Overdue Excise Tax
Before I purchased 143 Fearing Street I owned a VW Beetle. Near the end of one year, I sold that car and purchased another car that had working heat. Unfortunately, the person I sold it to did not transfer the registration to their name until the beginning of the next year. In Amherst you are charged an excise tax for owning a car even if you just keep it parked in your driveway. The result of the title not being transferred was that I received an excise tax bill for for that car for that next year, even though I no longer owned it. Based on the valuation of that car, that bill was for $6.35. However, because I no longer owned the car I threw the bill away. Ten years later I was pulled over in Amherst for having an expired registration decal on my licence plate. I had re-registered the vehicle, and had been mailed the decal, but I didn’t have time to take off the old decals before I could put the new one on my plate. When the officer pulled me over I showed him that I had the new decal in the car. That is when the officer told me that I had a bench warrant for my arrest for unpaid excise tax. He handcuffed me, arrested me, and had my car towed away.
What had happened was that because the excise tax was not paid on that VW Beetle ten years before, there had been a fine levied against me, and another, and a third, until finally a bench warrant had been issued for my arrest for failure to pay that tax. In those ten years I had purchased a home in Amherst, and was by then paying excise tax to the town for two other cars. Moreover, the way I would pay my taxes was by personally going to the town hall and talking with the town collector while I wrote out the the checks. But even though the town collector knew me by name, and she had collected taxes for my home and the other vehicles that I owned for ten years, she never mentioned that I had this outstanding excise tax bill. After that first bill, I had never received another, nor had I received a notification of compounding fines or the warrant for my arrest. What I later learned is that the court is not required to send notifications of these bills or of a bench warrant being issued.
I was bailed out of jail, I hired a lawyer, and the magistrate dismissed the ticket for not having the sticker applied to my plate, but would not dismiss the penalties for failing to pay the excise tax even though I was never notified that they were accruing. Because I was arrested, I lost two days of pay for lost work, and I need to pay over $1,000 in legal fees to my attorney for representing me in court. I also had to pay $360 in fines and penalties for failure to pay my excise tax and I needed to pay the original $6.35 for having technically owned that VW for two months into that following year. But worse than the $1,600 that this cost me, I was now scared whenever I drove my car in Amherst. I always had the feeling that there was something I forgot to take care of that was going to cause me to be arrested. My fear was justified when I had a similar experience several years later. After being arrested, I avoided driving through the Amherst town center if at all possible. I just wasn’t worth the risk.
An Unpaid Speeding Ticket
When I was seventeen, I got a speeding ticket for driving 65 miles an hour on Route 91 just north of Chicopee Massachusetts. That stretch of highway had a 65 mile and hour speed limit which was reduced to 55 miles an hour by the Carter administration, and then increased back to 65 miles an hour several years later. When I got home I gave the ticket to my mother to pay, explaining to her that I wasn’t used to driving her Cadillac. It had a lot more power than my old Peugeot. She didn’t seem too upset about me getting that ticket and I didn’t give it another thought.
Fifteen years later I came out of my house on Fearing Street and found that I had a flat tire. Unfortunately, my spare was too soft to drive on and the only other tires I had were my winter studded snows. I put one of my winter tires on the car and went to work and to do my errands. Driving across the UMass campus I was pulled over for having this one studded snow tire on my car in August. Aparently there is at least one officer on the campus who is good at identifying studded snow tires just by the sound they make.
The officer pulled me over and gave me a ticket for the studded snow tire and he told me that he could arrest me for driving on a suspended licence. He said that my suspension was due to an unpaid speeding ticket. Because of my previous experience with being arrested I put it at the top of my list to call the registry the next day to find out what was wrong. Being upset about the ticket, I immediately went to my mechanic where he fixed my tire and my spare.
There was a young woman who I had been asking to dinner at my house for over a year. Finally, that evening she had accepted my invitation and I was happy to prepare a wonderful dinner for her. We sat and visited, and I remember that we were just about to have ice cream when the phone rang. The person asked for me and I told them I was there. About five minutes after I hung up the UMass police came to my door. They asked to see my drivers licence and I showed it to them. Then they took me away from my dinner, handcuffed me, and arrested me.
It wasn’t until after I was booked that I learned that I had been arrested for driving on a suspended driver’s licence. What the police did was against the law. No person can be arrested in their home for a motor vehicle infraction. I was taken to the UMass police station where I was booked. I was then transferred to the Amherst police station where I was held until a magistrate could come to the station and bail could be posted. Later I was told that I was lucky that a magistrate was available on a Friday night. If she hadn’t been able to come I would have been held in the Amherst jail until Monday morning.
I contacted my attorney and he said I could handle this matter myself. He told me that it was important for me to clear the speeding ticket and have my licence reinstated before the hearing for the ticket. I went to court in Chicopee and where I paid the speeding ticket that I had received fifteen years before as a minor. I also went to the registry where I got my licence reinstated.
I was surprised that my driver’s license could be invalid because in the twelve years that I had been an Amherst resident, I had renewed my drivers licence twice, each time getting a new picture taken. What I was told is that if you renew your license by mail, they do not check to see if it is suspended for some other reason. My attorney told me that there was no provision in the law requiring them to notify you of a suspended license. This felt like the excise tax. They don’t have to notify you when there are fines and penalties being levied against you. It didn’t seem right to me at the time that I had to pay to renew my license again, after I had already paid to renew it earlier that year.
When I went to court, the magistrate asked me if I had paid the speeding ticket and reinstated my license. I told him that I had in both cases. I then thought that he had ruled in my favor, but I was upset when I was told that I still had to pay the fine for driving on a suspended licence. I asked him if I could appeal having to pay that ticket, and he said that it would require going to trial. I didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars to my attorney to argue a case for a seventy five dollar ticket. I paid the fine and I left. Like with the matter of the excise tax, going to court twice cost me two days of lost wages.
My dread of living in Amherst was growing. Any small mistake that you made long ago would eventually grow until it was a major crime and you would be arrested. When I was a teenager, my mother was frequently sick. I can only guess that is why the ticket was never paid. I have no doubt that if I were to return to Amherst now years later, there would be some small matter that was left unpaid that would lead to my arrest. I have no idea how lifetime Amherst residents live under that kind of constant threat.
After having been arrested in my home, I refused to drive on the UMass campus ever again. Since three of the four streets surrounding 143 Fearing connect to the UMass campus, I viewed that my house was located on a dead end street and that there was only one way in and out. I also refused to drive in the center of town because of the strong police presence. For me, the town of Amherst was shrinking.
I asked my attorney if I could sue the UMass police for having arrested me in my kitchen over the matter of a suspended driver’s licence. He said that I could, but if I did they would then arrest me if I “spit on the sidewalk” after that. This reinforced my understanding that the police in Amherst can break the law without any consequence.
My auto insurance also went up as a result of this incident. I received three points on my licence for driving on a suspended license. If I had known that I was going to have to pay more than a thousand dollars in increased insurance premiums, I would have gone to trial to appeal the ticket.
After that arrest, I made it a point to call the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Massachusetts at least once or twice a year to ask if my licence was suspended. These phone calls sometimes took a half hour or more of registry staff time. The staff would ask me if I thought my licence was suspended and I told them that I had no idea, but since they were not required to notify me if it was, I was going to keep calling them to check. I suggest that every driver in Massachusetts regularly call the RMV to check if their licence is suspended. This would quickly bog their system and it would make it cheaper for them to notify drivers about licence suspensions than have to answer an endless series of phone calls.
Finally, the the young lady who was at my house for dinner would never go out with me again. She talked with me on the phone a couple of times but there was nothing I could say so that she would see me again. Years later, after we had both moved away from Amherst, I found her number in Seattle, Washington. I left a message for her with her housemate, but she never returned my call.
Eventually, I avoided driving my car in Amherst was as much as possible. Every time you get in your car in Amherst you are strapping yourself into a bright, shiny target for the police. The only time that I felt safe traveling in Amherst was by bicycle, but even that option eventually went away as the bicycle path deteriorated and became unusable. If I did need to drive in Amherst I would only drive at night and even then only on certain safe roads where the police did not generally have speed traps.
By the time I left Amherst, there was a friend who described the way I lived as being “holed up” in my house. It just wasn’t worth driving in Amherst while there were police on the road. In the city that I moved to I have now driven the same vehicle for six years and I have never gotten a ticket. I don’t think that I have changed my driving since I left. The police just make Amherst a dangerous place to operate a car.