City offers relief to Chicagoans saddled with debt tied to administrative violations

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration on Thursday touted a pair of new programs baked into her 2023 budget to lighten the load for Chicagoans saddled with debt from administrative hearing violations.

City Hall has long used the administrative adjudication process to handle a virtual kitchen sink of quality-of-life offenses. They range from distracted driving, loud radio playing and motorcycle noise to fly-dumping, littering, over-flowing dumpsters and pollution violations.

Now, the Lightfoot administration is making two new offers that residents and businesses mired in administrative hearing debt may find difficult to refuse.

The first program, called “standard relief,” is open to all residents and businesses. There are no eligibility requirements or applications. It opened Tuesday, offering individuals and businesses the opportunity to have their interest, collection costs and court fees waived if they pay the original fine amount in full or enroll in a payment plan. The deadline is March 31.

The second program, known as “hardship relief,” is more generous, but it requires an application and is only open to residents — not businesses.

It runs April 1 through Dec. 31 and offers those in administrative hearing debt the ability to pay 50% of the original fine amount in full or enroll in a payment plan and have interest, collection costs and court fees waived.

To qualify, debtors must either be enrolled in Chicago’s Utility Billing Relief or Clear Path Relief plans or have a household income of less than $43,740 a year for an individual and $90,000 a year for a family of four.

Applications can be made at www.Chicago.gov/newstartchicago.

City Comptroller Reshma Soni said the two programs are a natural offshoot of earlier debt relief initiatives that have helped low-income Chicagoans get out from under debt tied to unpaid parking and city sticker fines and overdue water and sewer bills.

The city claims the earlier programs have provided $33 million in relief from overdue water and sewer bills to 20,000 households; $28.5 million in ticketing relief to 49,000 motorists; $11.5 million in waived city sticker debt; and $129 million in forgiven vehicle impoundment and storage fees.

Lightfoot campaigned on a promise to raise the boot threshold, stop booting for non-moving violations and eliminate a hefty chunk of red-light cameras if those cameras were used for revenue, not safety.

She has delivered on some of those promises. She stopped booting for non-moving violations, ended debt-based driver’s license suspensions and eliminated Chicago Public Library fines.

But Lightfoot has not gotten rid of any red-light cameras. In fact, she lowered the threshold for speed camera violations — to just 6 mph over the limit — generating an avalanche of new violations and fought hard to keep it.

Just this week, Lightfoot proposed a groundbreaking ordinance that would plunge Chicago deeper into the Big Brother world of video surveillance and automated ticketing.

It calls for installing cameras on CTA buses, city vehicles, light poles and other public property and using that footage to nail motorists who block bus lanes, bike lanes, crosswalks or loading zones.