Aurora lawmakers propose ending photo-radar van contract after mushrooming financial losses

AURORA | Members of Aurora’s City Council discussed pumping the brakes on a contract with a tech vendor March 21, after several months of losing money on a van-based network of cameras that photograph and generate tickets for speeding drivers.

“This thing seems about as useful as a chicken-wire raft to me,” Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky said during Thursday’s meeting of the council’s public safety policy committee. “We’re going nowhere with it.”

Council members voted in July 2022 to launch the pilot program, and a trio of vans equipped with radar and camera hit the streets a year later.

The city envisioned the program would pay for itself through the money raised from traffic citations. But by the end of December, the program was reportedly $352,861.06 in the hole, with city and police officials blaming operational problems as well as the difficulty of finding people to staff the vans.

Aurora lawmakers who attended the January meeting of the committee discussed pulling the plug on the city’s contract with Conduent, which lawmakers were told provides the vans at a total monthly cost of $83,400. Fully staffing the vans costs roughly $35,000 per month.

The council members ultimately directed city staffers to investigate how the city might cut its losses but did not declare their desire to sever the city’s relationship with Conduent, which would have left the city on the hook for an outstanding balance of about $1 million.

On Thursday, Lt. Chris Amsler of the Aurora Police Department reported that the city was on track to lose even more on the program — $535,243.60, by the end of February — and has only extended a single job offer since January.

The contract is scheduled to end in about four months. While interim police Chief Heather Morris said the vans are deterring speeding in the areas where they are parked, she, too, was pessimistic about the city recouping the cost of the vans.

Morris said Conduent is in the process of being bought by another company and suggested the city decline the renewal of the contract with Conduent’s new parent company when the handover occurs.

“We’re just going to get more, and more, and more in the hole every month until we can get this sorted if we don’t take this opportunity,” she said.

State law allows police to set up the vans near schools, city parks and ongoing road work as well as in residential neighborhoods with speed limits of 35 mph or less and in areas where police have recorded a high number of accidents or complaints about speeding.

Aurora police mail tickets to drivers caught traveling less than 25 mph over the speed limit and send officers to follow up with those who drove 25 mph or more over the limit.

Amsler said that, as of March 12, the vans had captured 7,012 violations, including 39 high-speed violations and 2,590 violations that resulted in tickets being mailed. A further 241 violations were being processed, while 4,181 violations were thrown out for various reasons.

Jurinsky and Mayor Mike Coffman both said they supported city staffers preparing an ordinance terminating the city’s contract with Conduent and presenting it to the committee in April. City Manager Jason Batchelor also agreed to look into the timeline for the city seeking bids for a vendor to replace Conduent.

“This contract is heavily biased to the vendor at the expense of the city,” Coffman said. “We’re losing right now, and the contractor’s winning.”

Also on March 21, committee chairperson Jurinsky and member Stephanie Hancock:

• Heard from Morris that APD has started rolling out its new anti-bias training for police officers, which is one of the expectations in the department’s consent decree reform agreement with the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
• Indicated their support for an ordinance that would change the membership requirements of the Judicial Performance Commission to no longer bar Aurora residents who were licensed to practice law in Colorado or another state for at least five years and have no disciplinary record but are no longer actively licensed, which Director of Courts and Detention Candace Atkinson said would help fill a vacant seat.
• Heard a report from Aurora Fire Rescue’s new assistant chief, Hunter Hackbarth, who said 29 of the agency’s paramedics have limited the scope of their work to that of an EMT following the convictions of Peter Cichuniec and Jeremy Cooper, reflecting an increase of four members since the phenomenon was first reported March 3 by the Sentinel.