For many Inland residents, a painfully long commute to work in a neighboring county is a fact of life.

To shave a few minutes off the drive, a few hundred dollars a year in express lane tolls is a price some are willing to pay.

But $27,347.10 in toll fees and fines?

That wasn’t the figure Menifee resident Cameron Aanestad had in mind when he started using the Highway 91 toll lanes on his commute to Anaheim, where he worked as a computer technician.

Yet somehow, that’s the bill the 31-year-old husband and father of one managed to rack up after what he describes as a billing mishap.

“This is devastating,” Aanestad said, explaining that he and his wife are in no position to fork over $27,000.

“As a practical matter, we just don’t have it,” he said. On top that, he added, “It just irritates my sense of justice.”

Aanestad said he owes $687.10 in actual tolls from 141 trips dating from Nov. 2013 to July 2014. The rest of the charges, he said, are fines.

The 91 freeway toll lanes cover a 10-mile stretch from the Riverside County Line to Anaheim. Account holders use a dash-mounted transponder that records each trip, deducting the tolls from a prepaid FasTrak account. Tolls vary by direction and time of day, ranging from $1.45 to $9.85, Orange County Transportation Authority officials said. Once a customer’s balance drops below a certain level, a set amount is charged to the account automatically.

If there is a problem with the credit card on file, a notice is sent by mail to the account holder, said Joel Zlotnik, an OCTA spokesman.

Fines start at $25 and escalate as time goes on, with notices at every stage, he said. The maximum violation penalty is $190.

“We really do go above and beyond to let people know,” Zlotnik said. “We’re not in the business of collecting toll violations. What we want to do is get people home faster and to work faster on the 91 Express Lanes.”

Payment issues

Aanestad’s parents had added his car to their FasTrak account as a way to help him and his wife, who works as a teacher in Temecula. The couple has a 2-year-old daughter.

At some point, though, a problem arose. Aanestad’s parents were issued a new bank card and his mother didn’t update the payment information on the account. She didn’t notice when the occasional FasTrak replenishment charge stopped appearing on her bank statement, he said.

Aanestad said he and his family had no idea anything was amiss until a collections notice for thousands of dollars arrived last summer.

“It was an absolute shock,” he said. “It was totally off my radar and went splat in my kitchen.”

At the time, his mother called OCTA, made a payment and reactivated the account. She thought the problem was fixed. But it wasn’t. In December, Aanestad said, he got another bill – the one for more than $27,000. He said OCTA offered to cut the bill in half if it was paid immediately, but Aanestad declined.

Aanestad asked for a hearing to contest the bill but was eventually denied, he said. When a consultation with a lawyer offered little hope of a reprieve, he took to Facebook to air his grievances.

Missed notices?

OCTA officials said, for privacy reasons, they can’t discuss individual accounts. But the violation notification process involves multiple letters for each delinquent toll.

Aanestad insists his family never received the notifications OCTA officials say they should have. Though he concedes they might have missed a few letters, he said there is no way they could have failed to notice more than 300 letters.

Since he went public with his fight, Aanestad said he has heard from others who say they experienced similar issues with toll violation notices.

“It’s obviously a problem that notices aren’t getting to people,” he said.

OCTA officials, however, said unequivocally that isn’t the case.

“There is not an issue with the notification process,” Zlotnik said.

Transit officials said they recognize that mistakes happen when it comes to paying bills, so they try to be flexible if account holders address problems in a timely manner. But when an account has violations in the triple figures, Zlotnik said, “It’s a little bit of a different story.”

Whatever happened, both sides agree on one thing — it is exceedingly unusual for someone to run up at $27,000 bill with the OCTA.

Though the bill is still hanging over his head, Aanestad says he’s just glad to be through with the toll lanes and the 91.

He started a new job this week as a pastor in Temecula.

“I’m going to sleep,” he wrote Sunday night on Facebook. “And when I awake, I don’t have to drive to Anaheim. Amen.”

Contact the writer: 951-368-9694, sburge@pe.com