How Tigard Municipal Court Keeps Its Photo Enforcement Caseload Paper-Free

Located in the southwest corner of the Portland metro area, Tigard Municipal Court handles roughly 1,800 to 2,100 cases a month, primarily traffic violations. Photo enforcement accounts for the bulk of that caseload, and the remaining cases are mostly citations issued during in-person traffic stops. A team of seven staff members works alongside the judge and Court Operations Supervisor Holly Fenton to manage the Court’s daily caseload and operations.

Over the past several years, the Court has reshaped how it manages cases, records, and payments, moving most of its caseload from physical files to digital workflows. That includes introducing work queues, changing how overdue photo enforcement cases are processed, and sending convictions to the Oregon DMV electronically.

Leading that effort is Fenton, who brings more than 26 years of Oregon municipal court experience to her role, including 17 years at the City of Salem, where she helped lead two major case management system upgrades. Her experience with Neumo Court was also a deciding factor when Fenton joined Tigard Municipal Court nine years ago.

Tigard’s photo enforcement program launched in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit and case filings, along with every accompanying paper ticket, began arriving at the Court. For years afterward, checking a defendant in for court meant physically carrying a stack of tickets into the courtroom, and every case update required a paper file to move between staff.

Verifying scanned documents added another layer of manual handoffs: because a single case file could pass through as many as four different clerks, scanned documents had to be routed to another clerk for verification before the physical file could be destroyed. Reporting convictions to the Oregon DMV followed a similarly manual path, with abstracts printed and mailed for every conviction that affected a driving record.

When the city’s police department switched photo enforcement vendors, Fenton saw an opportunity to rethink how the Court handled case files, particularly as the Court prepared to become a court of record. Rather than maintaining a physical file for every photo enforcement case, her team moved to what they call paper-on-request files, with the information staff needs available digitally instead.

With the vendor transition as a catalyst, Fenton and her team built out work queues in Neumo Court to track incoming citations, flag overdue accounts, and keep cases moving through digital workflows. Incoming mail is now scanned as soon as it arrives, and the Court is extending the same approach to officer-issued tickets, drafting a policy that will let those files be destroyed once they are scanned and verified.

The Court also restructured how scanned documents are verified. Clerks can now verify their own work, while a separate reviewer spot-checks each batch rather than reviewing every file.

Fenton also pushed a longer-running project across the finish line: effective May 1, 2026, the Court began sending conviction records to the Oregon DMV electronically instead of printing and mailing abstracts. Court check-in advanced alongside these changes, too. What once meant physically walking a stack of tickets into the courtroom now runs through Neumo’s courtroom sessions and a dedicated queue the judge works from directly. The changes also supported the Court’s transition to court-of-record status.

Over the years, Fenton has worked with her team to identify opportunities, test new workflows, and continually improve how work moves through the Court.

Making Photo Enforcement Paper-Free

Photo enforcement, the Court’s largest caseload, now runs entirely without physical files. The information staff need is available digitally, while a physical file can be produced when necessary. Overdue cases, once handled by pulling and reviewing paper tickets, now move through a queue instead, with staff confirming no action has occurred before a case is marked delinquent by default.

“We don’t have physical files anymore. We like to call it paper on request,” Fenton said. She describes the overdue process as significantly easier to manage than the paper process it replaced, while work queues give her team a consistent way to organize cases and catch anything that might otherwise be missed.

Replacing Manual DMV Reporting

Electronic submission of convictions to the Oregon DMV eliminated the manual printing and mailing of abstracts. A clerk once dedicated largely to pulling tickets from payment reports, updating abstracts, and mailing DMV paperwork now has capacity for other work.

The change is part of a broader shift toward digital case processing at the Court. Online payments, electronic conviction reporting, and digital case records have reduced the number of steps staff need to complete manually, allowing the Court to handle routine transactions and reporting through connected digital workflows.

Getting New Users Up to Speed

Digital case access has also simplified onboarding. When a new pro tem judge needed to get up to speed, Fenton gave her a brief walkthrough; within about 30 minutes, the judge was pulling up cases, reviewing case files, and entering rulings on disposition documents for court staff to reference. “The system is very intuitive,” Fenton said. “It does a lot of what we need.”

New clerks typically develop a solid working familiarity with the system within four to six weeks of regular use. That ease of adoption has become particularly valuable as the Court brings on new employees and several new pro tem judges.

Automating Online Payment Workflows

Online payments have also become the default way constituents pay citations. Payment activity on pending cases triggers automated processing, while staff monitors the exceptions that require additional attention.

The approach reduces the need for staff to manually update routine payment activity and gives them a clearer view of the cases that need intervention. Combined with the Court’s digital case workflows, online payments have helped make routine citation processing more consistent while maintaining staff oversight where it’s needed.

Tigard Municipal Court is continuing its shift away from paper for in-person officer-issued tickets and onboarding several new pro tem judges onto the system. They’re also continuing to refine DMV reporting and records processes as new needs come up. Going forward, the plan is to keep digital records as the default and reserve paper for the cases that actually require it.