Speeding? You'll pay higher 'taxes'

By Christopher Solomon

Here's a tip for the next time you're barreling down U.S. 425 through northeastern Louisiana: If you see a sign that reads "Baskin Town Limits," slow down. Way down.

Baskin has been expecting you.

Between 2004 and 2006, little Baskin (population about 200) got 87% of its town budget from speeding tickets, the highest percentage of 304 Louisiana municipalities surveyed.

"It is primarily a tool in many communities to raise revenue," Louisiana state Rep. Hollis Downs, who represents two parishes in north-central Louisiana, says of the town's aggressive traffic enforcement -- what others might call speed traps.

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Baskin is perhaps the most extreme example confirming what you've long suspected: Tickets are often as much about revenue as safety. And now, as a soured economy or other factors further empty coffers, many are turning to law enforcement to serve as part-time tax collectors -- with guns and badges.

Many states and cities no longer even try to hide that fact.

Making up for lost money

Cities, counties and other government agencies have found that there's lots of money to be made in stepped-up traffic enforcement:

• The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority said that it would collect an additional $1.2 million in fines from speeding tickets in 2008 to make up for lost revenue when troopers from the Massachusetts State Police were transferred the previous year to work around Boston's "Big Dig" project.

• In 2006, Massachusetts began a pilot program that rewarded state troopers for giving out tickets as opposed to warnings. The number of citations had been down in recent years, the Boston Herald quoted troopers at the time, and pressure was on the rise from both the courts and the insurance industry. Both profit from more civil fines. The State Police did not return calls for comment.

• New York City announced in November that it would hire 200 additional ticket agents to step up enforcement of laws prohibiting drivers from blocking intersections. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly estimated the black ink at $66 million a year.

• A law that went into effect July 1 in Colorado doubled fines for speeding (the supporting information noted it would raise about $12 million annually for the strapped state). Another law has made speed guns mandatory in road-work zones.

• In Arizona, speed-enforcement cameras generated citations worth more than $6 million in just the first two months after installation.

'Welcome to Detroit; here's a ticket'

The complicated -- sometimes comical -- experience of two Michigan police departments shows how sticky the issue can get.

A Detroit News analysis last fall found that metro-area police departments had "drastically increased" the number of tickets issued for moving violations as revenue from the state -- in the throes of multiple economic crises -- had declined markedly.

• Talk back: Should strapped cities hand out more traffic tickets?

One department, in Romulus, issued 12,040 tickets in 2007 -- a 136% increase since 2002 -- despite a population of just 25,000, according to the newspaper's analysis. Detroit Metropolitan Airport sits within the city and is accessed by two interstate highways. Romulus unmarked patrol cars regularly ticket drivers exiting to the airport or accelerating away from it.

The city's traffic enforcement effort has grown so aggressive, some say, that a remarkable cat-and-mouse game has sprung up between airport officials and Romulus police.

"We have taken the initiative of alerting our customers," airport spokesman Michael Conway says. How? By handing out warning fliers to drivers and telling airport police to park near the unmarked patrol cars with their lights flashing, to slow motorists.

When the airport installed a temporary electronic radar signs that tells motorists "Your speed is . . ." Romulus police threatened to tow it away, Conway recalls, still chuckling in disbelief.

Romulus police Lt. John Leacher says officers don't have a mandate to fill city coffers. "We've been doing this (emphasis) for the last four years," he says, "and we haven't been doing anything different than we were then."

From July 1 to about mid-November, Romulus had issued tickets for about 10,000 moving violations, according to the airport's police chief, on pace to crush 2007's record.

It's not the welcome mat that the Detroit area should be rolling out, Conway says. "The first message out of town visitors get is, 'Welcome to Detroit; here's a ticket.'"

A new way to tax?

The simple fact is this: Governments have an incentive to write more tickets, says Thomas Garrett, an assistant vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a co-author of a recent study, "Red Ink in the Rearview Mirror: Local Fiscal Conditions and the Issuance of Traffic Tickets" (.pdf file).

Garrett and his co-author, Gary Wagner, studied tickets issued by North Carolina counties over 14 years and found that "significantly more tickets are issued in the year following a decline in revenue."

But in years after revenue increases, there was no corresponding drop in traffic tickets, they wrote. "Our results suggest that tickets are used as a revenue generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety."

Continued: Why is this happening?

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