Long ago.  And oh so far away.  You got a speeding ticket passing through South Cacalacca.  Well, you figured you would never make that mistake again. No, not speeding, but passing through South Cacalacca, and for 30 years, you waved as you flew over it, never thinking again about that lonely summons sitting quietly in a clerk’s office somewhere awaiting payment that never came.

Guess what? It’s ba-aaa-ack.

Patricia deWeever got a surprising notice recently from the state of Massachusetts, saying her license would be suspended if she didn’t settle parking tickets she received 25 years earlier in New Jersey.

Huh? Twenty-five year old parking tickets? The state of Massachusetts isn’t kidding, and neither are New Jersey and states and cities across the country which are turning to collection agencies that specialize in tracking down people who owe them money from the days of Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s presidencies. Those tickets were written often before such records were even computerized.

What? You thought nobody would ever figure out how to use a computer to locate the scofflaws of days gone by?  It’s money, and few things motivate government more than getting money. Especially money that comes from miscreant scofflaws. Like you.

So it’s ancient. You don’t even remember it. You can’t be sure you ever got the ticket, or if so, whether you deserved it.  So what?  The time to fight died with Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense plan, and it’s not written in stone. All it waited for was the chance to find you again. And now it did.

What about the statute of limitations, you cry.  How could something so old come back to bite you in the butt decades later?

While many states have a statute of limitations on prosecuting felonies, there are few that have such limits on prosecuting parking tickets and moving violations. New York State is one of the few, with a statute of limitations of eight years and one day from the date of judgment.

Yes, New York is an enlightened state, though I bet some grocery clerks wish it was otherwise now.  But it’s not going to help you in South Cacalacca, where that unpaid judgment will not only linger forever, but track you down and find you.

Private corporations track down the old scofflaws in exchange for a cut of the ticket revenue, so it doesn’t cost municipalities anything to hunt people down. One such company is Massachusetts-based Municipal Management Associates (MMA). On the firm’s website, it boasts reeling in $753,440 in uncollected parking violations for Springfield, Mass., over 17 months, out of a total of $5.6 million that was on the books.

For the government, it’s found money.  For the collectors, it’s great business. For you, it’s, well, tough.

One of the frustrating things for consumers is that details of a 20-year-old ticket are sketchy or non-existent. The fines add up to a couple of hundred dollars, and most draw the conclusion that they will pay it rather than endure the hassle of hiring a lawyer, or pursuing a Byzantine process of challenging it. In deWeever’s case, she will end up paying New Jersey $129 to settle the tickets plus a nebulous $100 license reinstatement fee, so she can legally drive in New Jersey to go visit her mother. On top of that, Massachusetts is also charging her $100 to reinstate her license in that state.

It may well be that you never received the ticket, or didn’t deserve it, or the cost or circumstances of fighting it just didn’t work out at the time.  Whatever. 

In the age where everything about you is readily available online, this initiative shouldn’t come as any surprise.  Just wait until libraries figure out they can collect those late fees for failure to return Pat the Bunny.

No need to harp on the loss of privacy or the invasiveness of government in our mundane lives.  But there’s no walking away from ancient history anymore.  That uncool cop after that wild college party doesn’t remember you either, but 25 years later, he gets the last laugh.  Suck it up and pay. You’re not going to beat it.

H/T Hinterlands correspondent, Kathleen Casey, who has never violated a traffic law. Ever.