- November 17, 2024
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The city of Palm Coast has halted part of its red-light camera program as it awaits the outcome of a legal case, now winding its way through an appeal process, which might allow the city to free itself from its contract with camera company American Traffic Solutions. The contract would otherwise end in 2019.
But an appeals court ruled in October in a case about Hollywood, Florida’s red-light camera program that it is illegal for third-party vendors like ATS to issue Uniform Traffic Citations — the $264 fine issued if someone caught cited by a red-light camera doesn’t pay an initial $158 fine issued by the city — and that only municipalities or counties should issue the UTCs.
Palm Coast doesn’t have the manpower to do that itself, Landon said, and its ATS contract doesn’t require it to. So for now, it isn’t.
The cameras will continue to operate, and the city will mail out $158 notices of violation. But if someone doesn’t pay the $158 — for now, anyway — nothing happens. “It sits in a file,” Landon said.
Hollywood has appealed the ruling, and if the court considering the case overturns it and allows ATS to resume issuing UTCs, anyone who didn’t pay the $158 within the 60-day time frame could be hit with the $264 UTC — a gamble for anyone thinking of dodging the $158 fine.
“I don’t want anybody to think, ‘I’m not going to get a UTC,’ because once the court rules, they might get a UTC,” Landon said.
But if the fourth district court of appeal rules that ATS cannot send out UTCs, Landon said the city would have two options to comply with the court ruling: It could attempt to issue UTCs itself — but, Landon said, “We didn’t sign up for this; we’re not getting into the business of sending out UTCs to violators” — or it could continue doing what it’s doing now, and issue $158 notices of violation without the $264 UTCs, which would mean that anyone who didn’t pay their violation notice wouldn’t haven to worry about the penalty of the higher fine.
And, Landon said, “then the contract becomes very interesting, because then we’ve got a section on it that is no longer consistent with state law.”
City Attorney Bill Reischmann has advised that the city, if the court upholds the decision in the Hollywood case barring ATS from issuing UTCs, take its contract with ATS to a judge to see if it would still be valid or if it could be thrown out.
Landon showed off some benefits of the cameras in a series of charts displaying dramatic drops in red light violations since the cameras went in: In the intersections where the first 10 cameras went in, there has been an 80% drop in violations since their installment in 2008, Landon said. The number of violations in intersections where the other 33 cameras were installed in 2012 has been cut in half, he said.
New City Councilman Steve Nobile, who opposed the cameras during his campaign, said he didn’t think the benefits of the cameras outweighed their costs. “We’re looking at approximately $1.8 million, this year, leaving our economy,” because of the cameras, he said.
“That’s one of the drawbacks,” Landon replied.
“That’s a huge drawback,” Nobile said. “What we’re talking about is punishing the entire community, and not just the person who received the violation.” Nobile pointed out that the violation notices go to a car’s owner, not its driver, forcing the owner to implicate someone else to avoid paying a fine if they weren’t driving the car when the violation occurred.
“At some point you have to weight the payoff, and this, to me, does not have any value against its negative drawbacks,” he said.
