Almost 2,500 warrants will be eligible for forgiveness by the Reno Municipal Court starting next week. Reno Public Radio's Michelle Billman reports.
For one month, people with warrants for traffic violations and minor misdemeanors can pay what they owe, have their warrants canceled, and not worry about additional warrant fees. Judge Dorothy Nash Holmes is leading the program.
"Everyone gets traffic tickets. I mean, I get traffic tickets. You wouldn't believe who has come into my court," Holmes says. "I think everybody understands this is just a part of life, and our objective is to get people to act responsibly and not to be afraid of the court."
If everyone who is eligible came forward, that would result in $1.9 million dollars for the city.
"I have no delusions about that happening," she says, "but I do think that it will help our coffers a little bit; it'll help our paperwork a lot. We don't want to have a backlog of cases."
When Holmes was first elected nearly six years ago, there were about 10,000 old warrants. The court has purged those, but now has a backlog of about 5,000 at any given time.
