1,662 ticketed by Bluff City traffic cameras, netting city $150K in fees

PINEY FLATS, Tenn. – Justin Hale was delivering a pizza in Bluff City nearly two weeks ago when he saw a bright flash in his rear-view mirror.

“It scared me,” Hale said Friday of one of two new speed cameras used by the Bluff City Police Department to monitor traffic speed along a stretch of U.S. Highway 11E. “I was just like, ‘Argghh, they got me’….with my luck, that’s how it is.”

Hale, 21, delivers pizzas for Piney Pizza, a restaurant about a mile from the speed cameras.

He is one of almost 1,700 people who are the first to be cited for driving too fast through a 1.3-mile stretch of 11E that is a 45 mph zone. That number of citations went out during the first six weeks of the camera’s operation.

Although the cameras went online in December, they began issuing citations on Jan. 1.

The stretch of highway monitored by the cameras starts about 200 yards in front of Pardner’s Bar-B-Que and Steak restaurant and ends at the Piney Flats crossroads.

And as the city sets out to collect the $150,000 worth of fines and court costs those citations could yield, those caught on camera will get a letter in the mail from an Arizona-based company that details the ticket and gives them a Web site address where they can pay the $90 fine, along with an 800 number for questions.

“If people would observe the speed limit then we wouldn’t have any problems,” said Bluff City Police Chief David Nelson, who insists the cameras are about safety and claims a decrease in accidents on 11E as a result.

The cameras have drawn interest from more than just those being ticketed. During the same six-week period when the citations were issued, almost a dozen state legislators have sponsored bills in the Tennessee General Assembly designed to do away with the devices or severely limit their use.

“This is clearly not the will of the people,” Rep. Tony Shipley, R-Kingsport, said regarding the use of speed and red light cameras for traffic enforcement.

The devices have generated so much hatred among the state’s residents, Shipley said, they’d probably lose if people were given a choice between them and the dreaded state income tax.

“Do they hate them?” asked Hale, who took some consolation from the knowledge that he isn’t the only one. “I don’t like them much, either.”

Tennessee cameras

The Volunteer State’s first traffic enforcement cameras went up in 2006, when the city of Gallatin signed up with American Traffic Solutions Inc., the Scottsdale, Ariz., company behind Bluff City’s speed cameras. The cameras were used to monitor traffic at two of that city’s red light intersections.

Gallatin installed a third red light camera in February 2007 and a fourth in October of that year.

In 2007, the Middle Tennessee city’s four cameras issued 19,630 citations to those running red lights, according to Police Department reports.

Gallatin also saw a 19 percent decrease in the number of its intersection-related side impact crashes and intersection-related crashes with injury, when those figures from 2007, the city’s first full year with the cameras, were compared to the numbers from 2005, when there were no cameras.

Picking up on this success, the General Assembly passed a law in 2008 that codified traffic citations “based solely upon evidence obtained by a surveillance camera.”

The 2008 law made traffic enforcement camera citations a nonmoving violation like driving an unregistered vehicle or one with expired tags.

Penalties assigned to nonmoving violations do not show up on a person’s driving record and are not reported to a person’s insurance company. They also are civil rather than criminal violations, by state law.

The 2008 law also set up a series of basic rules that cities using traffic cameras must follow, including one exempting emergency vehicles and another requiring localities to put up signs at least 500 feet in front of the devices to warn motorists of their presence.

ATS and its top competitor, Redflex Traffic Systems Inc., now operate speed and red light surveillance camera systems in 16 Tennessee communities, including Shipley’s hometown of Kingsport, which has more red light cameras than any other city in the state.

Mount Carmel is another Northeast Tennessee locality that uses traffic cameras. In April 2008, the city started using a Redflex speed camera to monitor traffic on a two-mile section of U.S. Highway 11W, which has a daily traffic count of 30,000 vehicles.

Those cameras issued 3,949 citations and brought in $101,401 worth of fines and court costs during their first nine months, Police Chief Jeff Jackson said.

But it’s a second set of numbers that Jackson’s most proud of: The city’s total number of traffic accidents fell from 95 in 2007 to 61 in 2008. Its total number of accidents involving injuries fell from 26 to 17 over that same one-year period.

“Our main purpose in this whole thing was to slow people down,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ve heard of a city that hasn’t had a reduction in accidents [because of the cameras.]”

Piney Flats

After a heated battle involving Bristol, Tenn., Johnson City and Sullivan County, Bluff City in 2000 annexed a 3.8-mile stretch of U.S. 11E that runs from the South Fork of the Holston River to the Piney Flats crossroads.

“Over the past few years, there’s been too many accidents there and far too many at high speed,” Chief Nelson said, explaining the purpose behind the speed cameras in Piney Flats.

Wanting to reduce the number of crashes, Nelson made a strong push in December 2008 to install speed cameras in front of Pardner’s, where the speed limit drops from 55 mph to 45 mph at the start of a commercial zone.

As part of this push, Nelson repeatedly cited Mount Carmel’s success with the speed cameras and used a traffic study from Bristol, Tenn., Traffic Engineer David Metzger conducted at the highway’s 45 mph zone between Jan. 9 and Jan. 16, 2009.

Metzger’s study found that 9 percent of the 114,991 cars and trucks that drove through the 45 mph zone that week were doing at least 55 mph, 143 of them were traveling at least 65 mph and 12 were doing at least 75 mph.

On April 10, the city’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted 4-1 to allow the city to install the speed cameras on U.S. 11E. They also signed up with ATS to operate the speed cameras in exchange for $40 of every $90 the system generates.

“The intent [behind these cameras] is not revenue,” Mayor Todd Malone said then, countering concerns by city residents that the purpose behind the cameras was to generate new money.

“The intent is to change driving habits on U.S. 11E,” he said.

During a warning period from Dec. 2 to Jan. 1, the cameras issued nearly 2,300 warning citations to speeders.

But 1,493 real citations went to speeders in January and another 169 were issued during the first nine days of February.

In November, there were six vehicle accidents in the 45 mph zone of the section of 11E now monitored by Bluff City’s speed cameras, Nelson said.

There wasn’t a single accident on that strip of highway in December and only two accidents there in January, he added.

Customer service

Once the speed cameras identify a vehicle that’s driving too fast, they send a picture of the vehicle’s license plate, a vehicle registration record that matches the license plate and a video of the car to the Bluff City Police Department.

Nelson and other officers then check to make sure the license plate’s picture matches what’s on the record. If the picture isn’t clear, the two license plate numbers don’t match or ATS can’t find a valid registration for the license plate, the citation is tossed out.

Once this review is complete, Nelson said, ATS’ “customer service takes care of the rest.”

These representatives are available from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday, ATS spokeswoman Ellen Pence said. Callers are given information about the Web site, www.ViolaitonInfo.com, where they can get more information about their citations and see the pictures and video of their vehicles.

Customer service also provides callers with information about ways to pay the $90 fine, and how they can schedule a hearing to contest the ticket in court.

“Nobody has challenged [the citations] as of yet,” Nelson said.

One reason for this, he said, could be that the notices are just starting to show up in people’s mailboxes.

Another reason for the lack of court challenges could be that if a driver requests a court hearing and he or she loses, the citation’s nonmoving violation becomes a moving violation, which means it shows up on his or her driving record and could affect car insurance rates.

But the court system isn’t the only option for challenging the tickets. Pence said those who call customer service can request a transfer of liability form, which allows them to place responsibility for the citation on someone else.

“There could be a million reasons,” why people request these forms, she said.

So far, however, no one has requested one, but “it’s still a little early,” she said.

The 2008 traffic surveillance camera law spells out three reasons someone might obtain a transfer form: someone else was driving the vehicle, the vehicle’s license plates were stolen or the vehicle was stolen.

The law requires people caught in any of these situations to sign an affidavit stating that they were not driving the car and either provide the name and address of the person who was or provide a police report detailing its theft.

This part of the process, Shipley said, is what bothers people the most.

“It offends me that I am presumed guilty until I am proved innocent,” the Kingsport representative said. “There is something wrong with this process.”

The State House

Shipley and about a dozen other state legislators, most from Northeast Tennessee, have made the fight against traffic enforcement cameras a huge issue during the current session.

Last month, House Majority Leader Jason Mumpower, R-Bristol, introduced a series of nine bills targeted at traffic enforcement cameras. Some would do away with the devices or bar other Tennessee localities from installing them after January 2011.

Others would: require cities to use only camera vendors based in Tennessee; require cities to post information about their use of the cameras on a Web site; and require localities with cameras to spend the revenue on education, transportation or public safety.

“People are very concerned about [traffic cameras] and the effect they are having on people’s lives,” Mumpower said, adding that his office has never received as many complaints about a single issue as it has with traffic cameras.

Another person taking the legislative route against traffic cameras is Rep. Bill Harmon, D-Dunlap, who chairs the House Transportation Committee and is sponsoring a bill that would place a two-year moratorium on new traffic cameras.

Harmon’s speed camera legislation also would require the state comptroller to study the devices and bar localities that have them from charging fines of more than $10 for the first offense, $20 for the second and $30 for the third and subsequent offenses.

But during a Wednesday subcommittee hearing, the Sequatchie Valley representative put his traffic enforcement camera bill on hold until April 1, so a group of local and state officials can develop a comprehensive set of standards dictating how the devices should be used. Harmon said he wants these recommendations to be part of his bill and become law this year rather than next. “If they do not do that by April 1, then I’m going to attempt to pass all of these bills,” Harmon said, promising members of the House Transportation Committee’s Public Safety Committee on Wednesday that his deadline would be a strict one and some action will be taken this year.

When asked about Harmon’s delay, Mumpower said he thinks it’s always a good idea to gather more information before passing a new law.

“But we can’t allow information gathering to lead to paralysis,” the majority leader warned.

Even so, Mumpower said he remains confident that some action regarding traffic enforcement cameras will come out of the state legislature this year.

And as the General Assembly awaits this study, Shipley is waiting on a response to a letter he sent to Attorney Genera Robert Cooper in December. That letter asks Cooper to issue a formal opinion on whether traffic enforcement cameras and the procedures behind them are constitutional.

While several federal court rulings uphold the constitutionality of traffic enforcement cameras, Shipley claims a June 2009 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court makes those lower court rulings a moot point.

The ruling affirms a defendant’s right to challenge the reliability of any bit of evidence collected against someone, Shipley said, and the reliability of any machine that’s used to gather the evidence.

People don’t have that opportunity when they challenge a traffic citation issued by a speed or red light camera, Shipley said, which is why he thinks using the devices “may very well be unconstitutional.”

Shipley said he hopes Cooper’s opinion will give someone the ammunition they need to challenge a traffic enforcement citation all the way to the Supreme Court.

“Ultimately, that’s where this is going to end up,” he said, adding that such a case could ignite nationwide opposition to the cameras.

“It will be like a bonfire that’s getting ready to explode,” he said.

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518