From Paben
As late as February 27, city of Bellingham staff were drafting a budget for the traffic-enforcement camera program; about a month later city officials issued a joint press release saying that the city would pay the camera company $100,000 for the right to halt the program. Click here to see my story about the agreement.
I got records back in response to a public disclosure request I did to city hall. The city was very quick in providing the records, and they did so at no charge. The records showed several things:
• Finance staff was working with other departments to create a draft budget for the program. In the draft I have – and I don’t know if it’s the latest – they predicted each camera would issue 10 citations per day, and they’d collect on about 40 percent of them. In total, the budget shows, the citations would yield up to $1.26 million per year. Expenses were estimated to total $726,000 per year, under the draft budget. So the city was expecting to net $533,000 per year. This budget is in line with what staff very early on estimated a camera program might generate.
• The red-light cameras weren’t expected to generate as much revenue as the speed cameras in school zones. The red-light cameras were expected to generate $60,000 per month in citation revenue, or $15,000 each. The speed cameras were expected to generate $45,000 per month, or more than $22,000 each.
• What they didn’t give me is likely much more interesting than what they did. There was a long list of emails and attachments the city withheld, citing attorney-client privilege. Early in Mayor Kelli Linville’s term City Attorney Joan Hoisington sent her a one-page email. Most of those withheld emails took place in March. City Council member Seth Fleetwood previously told me the following, regarding the $100,000 payment to camera company American Traffic Solutions: “There were other tactics we might have employed to stop the cameras, but they all involved risk and the prospect of continued litigation. This result limits our potential financial exposure and puts this whole thing to bed.” It’s unclear whether those withheld emails involved discussion of those ‘other tactics.’ Click here to see some heavily redacted emails that were provided to me.
• The city, including the city attorney’s office, and American Traffic Solutions’ attorney in Seattle, Vanessa Soriano Power, worked together to craft a press release acceptable to both. The records indicated there might have been four versions of it.
Overall, I didn’t see anything too super revealing. I thought it’d be worthy of the blog, because people with a particular interest in the topic might be interested in seeing the records, but probably it doesn’t rise to the level of a print article.
Thanks for sharing this Jared,
Boy, I’d love to read the redacted email that starts out with “I hope that answers it finally”. I couldn’t help but laugh. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could actually understand what happened, starting from the beginning – which would likely begin back in early 2008?
Anyway, this will (like you said), only possibly be interesting to “people with a particular interest”.
I just wanted to point out that I remember first seeing the 500k figure when the Fiscal Alternatives for Stability Taskforce (FAST) final report was found last fall (this is the COB document that had been online for a couple of years, which mysteriously disappeared from the city’s website 24 hours after we mentioned it in one of your red-camera article’s comment sections, only to see it reappear on the city’s website after we got bent out of shape about it).
That document, dated May 18, 2009 (page 11) says “Estimated annualized penalties/revenues: $500,000”.
So where did that figure come from? I guess that’s the (half) million-dollar question, isn’t it? I think it’s pretty clear the city was given that number by American Traffic Solutions (ATS). We can’t be sure, but the city pretty much specifically asked for that information a full nine months before the 500k estimate appeared in the FAST final report.
I believe the question essentially asking ‘how much can we make?’ first came up (in print) on August 18, 2008, in this email between Sgt David Richards (BPD) and Bill Kroske from ATS:
“Bill,
Lt. SNIDER has asked that I get some information from you as we proceed, ever so slowly, on moving towards Red Light cameras. Our city council is a little cool to the idea right now but may warm up. I will be working on this as best I can trying to be ready for their questions. They have tasked us to get some of these answers before they will consider a presentation from a vendor.
List of cities in Washington currently using your system with number of intersections each has working at present.
Law Enforcement contact person at each city using your system
Which of these cities also do school zones
Tickets per year – per city Red Light and School Zones if they do both.
Revenue generated (I know this will be a tough one. If you have hard numbers great if not we can estimate).
Also do you have statistics that show an average number of red light tickets we might expect if we have the traffic volume for an intersection? Say an intersection has 30,000 vehicles go through it every 14 hours what might we expect for violations.
Thanks
David
Sgt David Richards
Traffic Division
Bellingham Police Department”
As we know from other cities across the country, a lot of the wishful thinking some folks had on revenue didn’t pan out. Los Angeles for example, finally dropped their red-light cam program after they really crunched the numbers and realized how much time and energy went into reviewing tickets and court/ collection costs, etc. They weren’t making a profit and the safety benefit wasn’t meeting expectations either. A lot of these cities wanting out of their contracts also had to make payoffs to avoid legal action by the camera companies, even though the cameras hadn’t met anticipated goals, as sold by the slick salesman. The camera companies have never had an issue suing the cities that would not negotiate a settlement, regardless of whether the city had legitimate reasons to want out.
There was some discussion between those of us against the cameras about whether the city could actually break even, without adding the right-turn-on-red violations into the system. As I recall, Bellingham citizens were told on numerous occasions that there would not be right-turn-on-red violations enforcement using these six cameras. However (please correct me if I’m wrong) there was a clause cleverly put in the contract that obligated the city to actually do so if they weren’t making enough money to pay ATS their monthly fee, or if the BPD was not rubber stamping a set quota of tickets. So the potential was there for the city to lose money on this deal as soon as the cameras were turned on, or get into some serious litigation with ATS’ well-used legal team.
For what it’s worth, I agree with city’s assessment, that this (payoff) was the best alternative.
Two questions: One, how much time was spent on figuring out if we needed the cameras and what alternatives were possible, and two, how much time was spent on figuring out how to spend the revenue from the cameras?
Does Bellingham even have a 30,000 vehicle count per half-day intersection?
And isn’t the intended result of a traffic camera to eliminate offenses and so too the tickets that ensue?
Wouldn’t that make cash-flow estimates sorta dicey after the initial period?
As far as rubber-stamping tickets,
how on Earth would you do that since the BPD would have no say over the number or seriousness of any infraction photographed?
All in all it sounds like a sucker’s game from the start.
The good news is we only got snookered for 100k!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!