Submitted by Aiken Jacobsen on
In January we reported on Sacramento's plan to implement a "crash tax." In the midst of a budget crisis, Sacramento and many other California cities have proposed to start charging car accident victims for use of emergency services.
The fee would only apply to non-residents of Sacramento. Nonetheless, victims could expect to pay between $495 and $2,275 depending on the severity of the accident and the services needed. What's worse, this fee would be directly charged to already-injured drivers, as most insurance companies have refused to cover the crash tax.
In our last post we argued that the crash tax was a bad idea for several reasons, mainly because it adds insult to injury. Car accidents are devastating enough, especially when the accident was caused by another driver. To add expensive fees on top of this produces undue hardship.
The good news for critics of the crash tax is that it already looks as though the measure will be repealed. Earlier this month the Sacramento City Council voted 5-4 in favor of repealing the program at a future meeting.
City council members who voted against repeal kept reiterating the issue that the tax was needed to generate revenue for the city. City fire officials estimated that the tax could have generated a much-needed $500,000 per year.
However, precedent from other major cities with a crash tax shows that this anticipated revenue is often highly inflated. New York was the first city to implement a crash tax, and the revenue has only amounted to a fraction of what was projected.
For now it seems like Sacramento's crash tax may just become a paragraph in history. The program was never officially launched and therefore has yet to raise even a single dollar. We will update this blog with any future news about the city's crash tax repeal as well as other important Sacramento car accident news.
Source: The Sacramento Bee online, "Sacramento takes step to repeal 'crash tax,'" Ryan Lillis, 02 March 2011
