Brevard County cities owe the county Clerk of Courts office nearly $1.4 million in traffic fines because of a computer failure 2 1/2 years ago.
The glitch prevented the clerk's computers from calculating how the fines were to be divided among the many cities and agencies that receive a share from each ticket. That forced employees in the clerk's office to estimate how big each city's check should be.
It turned out some cities received more than they deserved, and a few received less.
Cocoa Beach, Palm Bay and Titusville are due refunds. The rest must pay the clerk.
The biggest losers are Melbourne and Cocoa, which have to pay back $430,992 and $353,083, respectively.
The miscalculations were discovered after the computers were fixed last summer, Clerk of Courts Scott Ellis said.
"When the software was fixed, we were able to go back through the books to 1999 to see what everyone should have gotten," Ellis said.
Melbourne Beach owes $227,150, which represents about 10 percent of its total budget.
The city regularly collects about $400,000 a year in ticket fines, he said. The overpayment was about $7,500 more per month than usual.
"This is a sizable hit on our budget," Melbourne Beach City Manager William Hoskovec said. "We will have to make some concessions or raise taxes to make up for it. And no one wants to raise taxes."
Ellis will meet with representatives of the cities at 1:30 p.m. today in the Supervisor of Elections Canvassing room at Building C in Viera.

It cost the county $750,000 to upgrade its computers for Y2K and another $175,000 to fix its problems afterward.
In addition, clerk employees had to work $500,000 in overtime to manually switch over records because the computers ran so poorly. During the 2 1/2-year span, the computers were blamed for missing paperwork, mistaken judicial assignments, the issuance of incorrect bench warrants and the failure to notify jurors of their summonses.
Besides the city that writes a traffic ticket, about 15 county and state agencies can share in the revenue collected from fines, including the Brevard Sheriff's Office, the Florida attorney general, the Department of Children and Families and the Department of Health.
When the clerk's computers went down, workers had to use reimbursement estimates based on figures from the year before, Ellis said.
Cities that owe money will have their biweekly payments reduced by 50 percent until Sept. 30, Ellis said. If the debt isn't paid off by then, he plans to withhold total collections until it is paid off.
"Since this money was collected over a period of 30 months, I think we should have at least that long to pay it off," Hoskovec said.
Melbourne City Manager Henry Hill said he also wants more time to pay back the money.
"I think what would be fair is to give us the same amount of time to defray the cost that it took us to accumulate it," he said. "We are going to need time to absorb this because it will have an impact on our budget this year and next."
But Ellis said the money has to be repaid in 18 months, which is the end of the cities' and county's 2003 budget cycles.
"We can't go carrying this debt on for years," he said.
The clerk's sputtering computers, a source of aggravation for the county since undergoing Y2K conversions in 1999, also are blamed for reduced traffic ticket revenues since then. During that period, the office was unable to suspend driver's licenses because it was impossible for the computers to track who was paying fines, chief deputy clerk Jim Giles said.

Without the threat of a license suspension, many motorists didn't pay their fines. But after the computers were back on line, notices were sent to the scofflaws. Collection of those unpaid tickets should generate another $4 million for cities and agencies to share. That eventually should reduce the cities' reimbursement payments.

Florida Today

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2002