BEN NEARY Associated Press writer | Posted: Friday, November 28, 2008 12:00 am
CHEYENNE - A proposed change in Wyoming law could make it more likely that parents who fail to make required child support payments could lose their driving privileges.
Brenda Lyttle, child support enforcement director at the Wyoming Department of Family Services, is pushing draft legislation. She said it would make it easier for her office to suspend driver's licenses for parents who are at least $5,000 behind in child support and who haven't made payments for at least 90 days.
Lyttle said an estimated 1,600 Wyoming parents could meet the criteria for losing their licenses.
"Our goal is absolutely not to take away driver's licenses; our goal is absolutely to get them to pay their child support," Lyttle said.
"We didn't want to target people who had jobs and needed to drive to go to work," Lyttle said. "Who we are trying to target with this law are people who have not been paying, and we have no evidence that they have a job, or they're paying taxes."
The Joint Interim Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider the draft bill at its Dec. 4 meeting in Casper.
Lyttle said her office already has authority under state law to suspend driver's licenses from people who owe child support without going to court. However, she said that the current provisions were essentially copied from laws concerning the Wyoming Department of Transportation. She said the laws would require her office to hire an administrative judge to preside over hearings and would require her office to collect fees it has no way of processing.
The proposal before the judiciary committee would remove barriers that currently keep the child support enforcement office from suspending driver's licenses, Lyttle said.
Most people in Wyoming who pay child support do so as a result of court orders from divorce proceedings, Lyttle said. She said in other cases, the parent who has custody of the child has been on public assistance and child support enforcement gets a court order to force the other parent to repay the state.
The amount of child support a person must pay depends on their income. Lyttle said that in a case in which both parents were making minimum wage, a child support order for the noncustodial parent would be $218 a month.
Sen. Tony Ross, R-Cheyenne, is a lawyer and co-chairman of the judiciary committee. He said he originally had concerns about the proposed bill because an earlier version lacked requirements to give people notice that they stood to lose their licenses.
"In Wyoming, we've always shown a strong preference that child support be handled within the courts," Ross said.
However, Ross said legislators have worked on the draft legislation to make sure that due-process elements were built into the administrative suspension procedure.
"We've made substantial changes to the bill that I believe I can support it now," Ross said.