AURORA | Lawmakers voted Monday to launch a 13-month pilot of a program that would send vans outfitted with speed cameras to areas around Aurora struggling with dangerous drivers.
The three vans equipped with cameras by technology vendor Conduent could be parked in residential areas or next to schools to automatically snap photos of speeding vehicles. City employees would then review the captured images and sign off on issuing a citation.
For the first month of the program, drivers caught speeding would only be issued a warning. After the first month, Aurora’s police department would use the cameras to ticket speeding drivers.
Aurora’s City Council ultimately voted 8-2 to launch the program.
“I get complaints weekly on, ‘Can you please enforce speeding?’ And my answer to them is we don’t have enough police officers,” said Councilmember Francoise Bergan, who voted in favor of the program. “I certainly understand that we want to make sure that we provide safety to all of our residents.”
Aurora police have said traffic fatalities rose 54% between 2019 and 2021, a trend which they believe is continuing in 2022.
Bergan previously expressed concerns about making the warning period long enough for the public to be educated about the program before tickets were written, which in part led to the first scheduled vote being delayed from June 27.
On Monday, after Lt. Carrigan Bennett of the Aurora Police Department said he thought 30 days was enough time for the city and the vendor to do initial outreach, Bergan said she supported the pilot program.
“My concern was more on education to the public,” said Bergan. “Obviously we’re trying to deter bad behavior, and tickets certainly get people’s attention.”
“I have reached out to several other jurisdictions around the country that use various speed enforcement and photo enforcement projects, and they all use a 30-day warning period,” Bennett said. “And the feedback that I got is that driving behavior is directly impacted more by citations than it is by warnings.”
Councilmembers Curtis Gardner and Dustin Zvonek voted against the program, saying they were uncomfortable with its similarity to the photo red light program that Aurora voters struck down in 2018.
Gardner also said he was concerned about the possibility of the city ramping up enforcement in the future to generate revenue, even though Bennett said the program is designed to collect enough fines to offset the $22,000 to $29,000 that each vehicle equipped by Conduent would cost the city per month.
The ordinance also specifies that surplus revenue will be spent on traffic calming projects, which Mayor Mike Coffman suggested in June.
“Law enforcement and public safety should not be used as revenue generation, and that’s what I’m afraid we’re going to do with this,” Gardner said, noting how youth violence programming and other city efforts that depended on photo red light revenues collapsed when voters ended that program.
Conduent previously facilitated the photo red light program, which Bennett told Zvonek was one of the factors considered by the city when it opted not to go through the RFP process — that, and the fact that the city does not “know what we would be putting in an RFP.”
Bennett said one of the goals of the pilot program would be to gather data on the efficacy of the mobile speedtraps so that the city can issue an RFP if it decides to go after a permanent program.
He also told Zvonek that police will be able to monitor changes in driving behavior in an area by tracking the speed of traffic generally as well as the number of citations issued over time.
Councilmember Juan Marcano said he saw the pilot program as a tool to curb dangerous driving and that being punished with a speeding ticket had the potential to change driving behavior in the short-term, an argument which Zvonek cheekily said he hoped Marcano would remember during the council’s discussion of mandatory minimum sentencing laws that night.
“I don’t see this pilot program as a solution in and of itself. My hope is that this will have a deterring effect in the short term,” Marcano said. “But our ultimate solution here is going to be changing the built environment. So that’s going to include traffic calming measures … but also reworking how our surface lanes and our streetscapes are utilized.”
I hope the program works, but have my doubts. Eventually, there will be a citizen initiative and the program will be voted down.
It’s a mystery to me how a representative government can within a few years pass legislation that is 180 degrees different from a direct vote of the citizens of that same government. First the pit bulls, now this photo radar situation. I hope there is political fall out of this decision.
oh, you mean vote out the conservatives? yeah, me too!
You can make a better comment than this Doug. You are going downhill but you did have a question as normal. Personally, I was surprised that most of the conservatives went against the will of the people. But Curtis may have brought himself back from the liberal abyss.
I’m not going to get my hair on fire over this new photo speed enforcement. Since Aurora has pretty much lost control and now having ended up as many of auto thieves running and around living amongst us, these thieves will be showing up in pictures behind many a windshield.
Xerox is the vendor and was the same red -light camera operator for the city years ago. The red-light camera setup was perfect for the short timing the yellow light a second or two. This was the scheme to increase the profits. Don’t know if Aurora was ever caught clocking the yellow lights, some crooked cities sure were. So this city better fly straight and just do what’s honest. Yes, the pit bull episode still resonates, akin to the council rolling over for Candice Bailey’s ordinance challenge. That one was very questionable, and maybe politicly driven to keep the peace. Council on thin ice when they do this stuff. If this program doesn’t cut the muster in it trial, cut it loose.
It sounds like the idea is to leave the vans parked and unmanned. So…given how high our vehicle theft rate is, what’s the over/under that the vans will just be stolen?
This is meant to catch speeders.
The real question is why does it cost 22k – 28k a month.
If this is not subverting the will of the people, I don’t know what is. The residents of Aurora voted to get rid of the red light cameras and now the politicians took a back door to basically do the same thing by packing those cameras into vans and planning to place them in various spots in the city. Ka-Ching!
Follow the money and you will see that those cameras are good sources of revenue for both the vendors and the cities. I guess the Aurora politicians must be going right through that proverbial “other door” that opens up when a door closes.
I agree that the self serving scum who act like dictators are trying again to back door an unwelcome program in an effort to make money, I refuse to think these clowns of whatever strf would make a real effort to enforce laws.
I do see speed indicator solar displays that remind drivers to slow down.
_money better spent..
This is because Wilson through her woke policies drove away our police