Earlier this year, the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration suspended the registration on Brett Wilson’s car over a roughly $30,000 E-ZPass debt that he said he had spent years trying to get to the bottom of.

Now, he’s back on the road, a lengthy saga of trying to discern between toll charges he unknowingly hadn’t paid and growing civil penalties now in his rearview mirror.

He received an email from a representative of the Maryland Transportation Authority, which administers E-ZPass in Maryland, just hours after The Baltimore Banner published a story about his and others’ struggles with E-Z Pass debts. Emails he shared with The Banner showed they offered to knock down what he’d have to pay to just under $5,000.

The spreadsheet they sent him detailing the outstanding charges is a lengthy, colorful list of dates, amounts and acronyms. The agency didn’t explain what those acronyms mean, or whether the hundreds of civil penalties were being forgiven, reduced or mistaken, Wilson said.

Wilson, a University of Baltimore student, said it lifted a weight off his shoulders. The saga has sparked a desire in the future law student to study consumer protections — he’s even considering pursuing a career in it.

The reduced debt was more manageable for Wilson than the previous payment plan offered by the Central Collections Unit, Maryland’s state-run public debt collector. They had asked for a down payment of more than $3,000 and then $280 monthly payments for years after that.

The collections unit, part of Maryland’s Department of Budget and Management, is an opaque operation with substantial authority. Unlike private debt collectors, they can use government databases to obtain an individual’s contact information and can seize money from their state tax return to apply toward a delinquent debt. State entities, from the MDTA to public universities and beyond, refer massive amounts of debt to the unit for collection each year.

Since The Banner published Wilson’s story, several readers reached out with their own tales of sudden or unexplained E-ZPass charges. One had been signed up for a frequent-user plan even though he said he only uses his transponder once a year. Another got wrapped in a mess of duplicate accounts stemming from having a hyphenated last name.

“I have had fees charged to my E-ZPass for which I see no explanation. The few times I have tried to get an explanation, I have either been on the phone longer than I was able to stay on, or my inquiry has been completely ignored,” another reader wrote in.

But not everyone has had a bad experience — one reader, who wrote that they have seven transponders across the family, also reached out just to say how wonderful their history with E-ZPass customer service had been.

Like them or not, tolls help Maryland maintain some of its most important infrastructure, like the Fort McHenry and Baltimore Harbor tunnels underneath the Patapsco River and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge — and they bring in a lot of money to do it. The MDTA collected more than $750 million in toll revenue in fiscal year 2023, according to the agency’s most recent publicly available financial report.