How do these small Texas towns with no tax base, no big businesses, no apparent means of supporting their local government employees, manage to do it?  They’re in the ticket business.

First, it was the “Dirty Thirty,” a line of four towns along a 30-mile stretch of Interstate 45 south of Dallas that issue a high volume of traffic tickets.

Now, welcome to the “Texas Triangle” – a group of small towns in Falls and Robertson counties southeast of Waco that are also in the ticket game, according to a longtime municipal court judge who said he quit over what he described as a ticketing quota system.

It’s no small thing to be a local judge.  People call you judge, and they bow and scrape a bit when you walk into the diner for a morning cup of coffee. They’re polite and laugh at your lame jokes because they may need you to look fondly upon them some day.  No, being judge beats the hell out of being village idiot.

“Normally, when they pull you over for safety, they ask the ‘safety’ kind of questions. They ask you for insurance; they check your tags. This was none of that,” said Don Shaheen, one of the thousands of Texans who got speeding tickets in April.

Instead of being concerned about safety, he said the officer just wanted to write a ticket and then get on to the next one.

For most people passing through, the fact that Barney the cop didn’t hassle you with license and registration is a good thing, not an issue to dispute.  You got in and out fast, and nobody got shot. If it’s a day when you’re getting a ticket, it’s a better day than it could have been.

But why not check the license for suspension? If it turns up something rotten, that means the cop has to arrest you, because he can’t let you drive away on a suspended license. An arrest takes him off the road for hours, and hours off the road means hours without issuing tickets.

“When I first became a judge, we had one reserve officer,” said David Viscarde. “That’s all he did on Friday and Saturday every other weekend. He’d write 100 citations.”

It was Viscarde’s job to handle the aftermath of that tidal wave of speeding tickets.

Funny how lawyers can see themselves as society’s janitors, cleaning up the mess people make when left to their own devices. Judges too.

For more than 15 years, he was a volunteer municipal court judge in the small town of Calvert in Robertson County, about an hour southeast of Waco. Calvert sits in the middle of a triangle of towns in Central Texas which statistics show are huge ticket-writers.

“Their municipal court is their cash cow,” Viscarde said about Calvert.

No, this doesn’t mean that all traffic tickets are issued just to raise revenue. But it also doesn’t mean some towns, some courts, don’t do so.  Once some jerk in the mayor’s hat realizes what a great scam he has available to him, combined with his total lack of civic knowledge or concern, highways magically turn into black asphalt ATMs with which he can create a fiefdom over which he presides without burdening his neighbors.  He’s a star. He’s a hero. His low self-esteem skyrockets with every passing motorist.

But he can’t do this without the help of his judge.  No, not a judge, but his judge.

“The pressure to collect revenues in Calvert — and probably other small towns in Texas — is excessive,” he said. “And what happens is, you got judges like me who say they’ve got better things to do with my time. ‘Thank you very much, and God bless you, I’ll move on.'”

Viscarde, who I note was a “volunteer judge,” meaning he was unpaid, but being a lawyer, could enjoy the trappings of judicialishness, finally had enough.

Former Judge Viscarde says small towns bank on no one taking their traffic tickets to court and simply mailing in a check. He said Calvert is incapable of trying cases because it has no prosecutor, and doesn’t want to pay for one.

“The mindset of most small towns — including Calvert, and I can only speak for Calvert — is, ‘After all, we’re only Calvert, who’s going to know?’ The problem is, I knew.”

First, what is the likelihood that some metrosexual from Dallas is going to willingly return to Calvert to challenge his speeding ticket in court?  Price the fine properly and nobody ever says “boo.” High enough to make a score, but low enough to make it too much bother to disagree.

Then again, this didn’t happen to Calvert, to Viscarde, overnight.  He knew that his “court” couldn’t try a case without a prosecutor, yet there he was, sitting as judge. Of what?  In 2010, the Calvert police department had three officers and a chief, all of whom quit because the pay stunk. Something had to be done about it, and something, apparently, was.

Did Viscarde not notice the police department mushroom in personnel? Was he unaware of the need for revenue to make Calvert’s government survive?  As the judge, he was not only in the middle of all this, but critical to its success.

He told News 8 that he quit as judge there because he was getting pressure from city officials to push speeding tickets through court.

Perhaps it happened incrementally, and he didn’t perceive it as a problem when it came drip by drip.  Perhaps it was fine with him, until the day the Mayor called him into his office and said, “judge, you’re not churning our money fast enough. You have to do better.”  Perhaps it was at that moment that the volunteer judge realized that his black robe couldn’t conceal the hot pants the mayor told him to wear.

Viscarde quit.  It was the honorable thing to do when he realized that he wasn’t really a judge, but the bag man for Calvert.  Most judges wouldn’t. After all, if they don’t fill the bags with cash, someone else will. And if they resign, no one will ever laugh at their lame jokes again.