ACE Cash Express at Abrams and Skillman (David Woo/Staff)
UPDATE: An MSB spokesperson says the company will not use ACE for Dallas collections.
Original item: The bare-knuckle fight yesterday over who should win the city’s municipal courts fine collections contract is over. And I believe it came out the right way.
City staff has been under pressure for years to do a better job of bringing in more of what’s owed on city tickets.
The staff put together a bid proposal that got an aggressive guarantee of more than $21 million from the winnning firm, MSB.
The council voted 8-7 largely on racial lines, to give MSB the contract.
The loser was the politically connected law firm Linebarger, Goggan.
An effort by some to re-bid this deal was unfair to the bidder, unfair to taxpayers and unfair to staff.
That said, I learned this morning about something with MSB that concerns me and that the city must correct now.
MSB apparently steers some people it is collecting from into the arms of the giant of payday lending – ACE Cash Express.
Note the offer below from MSB’s website. If you want to pay your back due fine in person, where should you go? Why, ACE. You don’t need to be too bright to figure out what happens when an unsophisticated person gets inside ACE.
Many people who don’t, or can’t, pay their tickets are poor. There are options for people without means; municipal judges help them all the time. Poverty isn’t an excuse for escaping punishment for breaking the city’s laws.
Nevertheless, our city should not be anywhere involved in sending people to a payday lender. Dallas must insist that MSB not accept payments for municipal fines at ACE.
Who knows, that may spell the end of MSB’s contract. Fine. It isn’t worth doing business with MSB if our poor are put in even more danger by landing in the lap of a payday lender.
The collections business needs to be aggressive. The city’s laws, and its fines, need to be taken seriously. But not this way. Not after all we have tried to do to keep our residents away from these lenders.