Daily Sun: Judge Resigns, Alleges Pressure to Hike Revenue

Judge resigns, alleges pressure to hike revenue
By Janet Jacobs
Daily Sun
The resignation of Rice Municipal Judge Delores Ramos has shed light on a small town struggling with finances and internal strife.
In a three-page letter to the city council last week, Ramos alleged the city kept her from seeing computerized court records, that the city secretary does too many jobs, and that code violation tickets were written by unlicensed officials. In separate interviews with the Corsicana Daily Sun, Ramos also contends she was pressured to generate revenue from tickets in her court to help finance the city.
Most of it comes down to money, said Mayor Larry Bailey.
The council will meet in a special executive session Thursday during the upcoming budget meeting to discuss the allegations, Bailey said.
Ramos resigned July 13, claiming the city was asking her to violate her ethics, but it came immediately after she was asked to take a pay cut by Bailey. Ramos called it a threat, of either take a cut or get fired. Bailey admits the conversation went something like that, but he said it wasn’t a threat, it was reality.
This summer, the city has laid off five people, including the entire street maintenance department. One police officer has been brought back as part-time, Bailey said.
“I said ‘Can you help us out and cut your salary in half for the next three months so that if it comes to it I won’t have to fire the judge?’” Bailey said. “We’re a small city, and we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to keep it open. We can’t let everybody go.”
Some city workers did receive raises, Bailey acknowledged, although he denies that the court clerk, Sherry Warren, receives $17 an hour. She gets $12 an hour, a raise from her previous $11 an hour because of her work ethic, he said. The rest of the raises were to keep the city employees above the new federal minimum wage increase in July, Bailey contends.
Limited access to the computer records was also due to the city’s dwindling finances, according to City Secretary Tanya Roberts.
In her letter of resignation, Ramos stated: “I am being denied full access to court records; therefore I cannot fulfill my judicial duties as judge. I will not be held responsible because of issues I have no control over.”
“The judge had access to all the files available, in the file cabinets,” Bailey said. “Her complaint was the computer. There’s nothing on the computer the judge has to do. The clerks do everything in the computer.”
Roberts said it was an auditor who recommended moving some staffers to the front office, including the judge, which precluded Ramos from having a computer on her desk. However, the reason they didn’t just get her a computer password was because it would cost more money for the additional software license, Roberts said.
“The judge has the actual piece of paper, access to all the (paper) files. I gave out as few passwords as possible because each password requires another license,” Roberts said. “We did the bare minimum to keep from paying the extra money the city doesn’t have.”
If the judge wanted to compare the paper files to the computer files, she could have a clerk pull up the file on the screen, which was done, Roberts said.
The previous Rice Municipal Judge, Wanda Hartley, said she didn’t have access to a computer in Rice, and didn’t want one, just as she didn’t get into the computer when she was a Navarro County Justice of the Peace. However, it should be up to the individual judge, Hartley said.
“I think if the judge wants access to the files, she should have it,” Hartley said. “You have to know everything’s going right in your office, and everything’s being done. It’s up to her to see if everything’s being done correctly. That’s not a legal opinion, that’s just my opinion.”
Ramos also alleges that Roberts and Warren were enforcing code violations without a license. Roberts said she received her inspection certificate on April 7, but prior to that she would take photos and send out letters. Any actual citations were issued by police officers, Roberts said.
It’s a matter of doing a lot with a small staff, Roberts asserted.
“I’ve done everything up here except mow and patch potholes,” said Roberts. “I’ve received my code enforcement officer certification. I’ve done everything, pay bills, planted plants at the park. In a small town, whatever needs to be done, you do it.”
That’s changing this week, anyway, Bailey said.
“What the judge didn’t know is we’d already been discussing switching the code enforcement to somebody else,” Bailey said. “We hired Sherry (Warren) as court clerk and code enforcer. Tanya got a code enforcement license so we could continue code enforcement. We’d already decided one of our girls (who is) a police officer was going to become the primary code enforcement officer. She’ll go full time code enforcement Monday, as a matter of fact.”
The separate allegation that Rice pressured Ramos to generate money from the court was backed by former police officers who worked for the city, but none could specify how much money, or cite a number of tickets they were required to write.
“They tried to pressure me that I had to collect a certain amount of money,” Ramos contends.
Nicole McMahan, a former Rice police officer, said there was pressure to increase ticket revenues, particularly after former police chief John Ellington was fired.
“That was always there … even when John was chief,” McMahan said. “They’d lay it down and want that revenue generated.”
Police officers who weren’t writing tickets “were in the hot seat,” McMahan said.
McMahan was fired in September over what the city called failure to fulfill probation, although she said that has since been rejected by a state administrative judge, she said. She is currently working as a police officer in Frost.
Quotas are illegal by state law, and McMahan said she doesn’t recall a quota in Rice, but the fines and tickets were pushed, she said.
Bailey and Roberts acknowledged the city has financial difficulties, but Roberts said they haven’t broken any laws.
“Every small town counts on ticket money revenue to operate the city, but the state limits what a city can produce in tickets,” Roberts said. “The state limits us on that. As far as telling her ‘you need to find all these people guilty,’ that never happened.”
According to a 1975 state law, a small town may only receive 30 percent of its total funding from speeding tickets, based on the previous year’s budget.
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Janet Jacobs may be reached via e-mail at jacobs@corsicanadailysun.com. Want to “Soundoff” on this story? E-mail: soundoff@corsicanadailysun.com