(Photo by Elvert Barnes)

D.C. drivers rejoice! Or, actually, maybe hang on a minute.

The D.C. Council on Tuesday passed a bill extending payment deadlines for many parking and traffic violations from 30 days to 60 days. The bill also gets rid of a provision that suspends people’s licenses if they fail to pay their fines, and institutes an option for community service performed at minimum wage to pay citations.

Ostensibly, the bill changes a lot. Right now, if you don’t pay your parking or traffic ticket after 30 days, the amount of the fine doubles. That means a $150 red light ticket becomes $300, and a speeding infraction of $300 jumps all the way up to $600. Critics of the practice have often contended that it falls harshest on the District’s low-income residents, who might take more than 30 days to put the cash together for a ticket only to find that by the time they’re ready to pay, the original amount has doubled.

The head of the council’s committee on transportation and the environment, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, says that “a lot of people do pay late, and they have this rather hefty fine they can’t pay. So we wanted to come up with something that made more sense for people.”

Six councilmembers introduced the bill, and it had two additional co-sponsors. It passed unanimously by consent.

There is, however, a fly in the ointment: this bill is going to cost the city money, and if the mayor’s office and the council can’t find a place in the budget, it can’t get enacted. (This is true of any bill that is going to cost the city money).

In June, Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt released a fiscal impact report estimating that the bill would cost the city $32.4 million in fiscal year 2019 and $124.7 million over the four-year financial plan period, just in lost revenues from citations. The bill will also increase costs by a few hundred thousand dollars because it would necessitate updates to the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles’ systems to accommodate the new deadlines, and extra staff members in the executive office to oversee the community service program the bill creates.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be keen on getting that revenue [from people’s late tickets],” Cheh says. “But the way this is looked at by the chief financial officer, we would be foregoing something that we would have otherwise had.”

The council already passed the FY19 budget back in May, which means there’s no way to enact this bill in its entirety now.

Looking forward to 2020, the Office of Budget and Performance Management Director Jenny Reed told DCist that it’s still too early to tell whether the mayor will find room to budget for this bill.

“We are just beginning the process for FY20 and we really need to look at needs across the whole District, including increased needs for workforce housing and schools … we really need to look at the whole picture,” Reed says. “Since the bill just passed [on Tuesday], it’s still early for us.”

If the mayor doesn’t budget for the costs of the bill, the council still might be able to make room for it during its review of the mayor’s proposed budget. But that whole process won’t begin until the spring of next year, when the mayor will submit her 2020 budget proposal.

Until then, the parts of the bill that cost the city money—in particular the extra 30 days it will take for people’s fines to double—can’t be enacted.

But Cheh says there are parts that can be put in place immediately, in particular the provision to stop suspending people’s licenses for failing to pay their traffic and parking tickets. This practice has also been frequently criticized for unfairly targeting poor residents of the District. With the passage of the bill, it won’t happen anymore.

“For those who are low income or who just don’t have the funds, [the loss of their license] may lead them to a loss of employment or other negative consequences,” Cheh says. “People without a license are then tempted to drive anyway … it’s a downward spiral. It’s a part of this whole phenomenon of criminalization of poverty.”

WAMU’s Martin Austermuhle contributed to this report.