Excise exception to stop bad camera law attempts

All in all, for those in Louisiana concerned that traffic enforcement devices – mainly red light and speed cameras – serve as little more than an excuse for a money grab by local governments have to consider this session of the Legislature in a positive light there being no harm, no foul, but as well a stepping stone for the future.

That conclusion is disheartening when considering recent progress on the issue. In recent years, the Legislature has acted wisely in circumscribing use of such devices. Most recently, it created much more stringent criteria on which vehicle owners could be charged with an infraction such as speeding, like limiting their use to school zones just at the beginning and end of a school day, and with penalty limitations. Still, they leave too much room for actions more consistent with maximizing revenue-raising than safety which additional strictures could address. Worse, Democrat state Rep. Dustin Miller managed to except Opelousas from these.

The lead author behind these changes, Republican state Sen. Stewart Cathey, ever since has tried to foment even more positive outcomes. In addition to the valuable changes last year, he also had a bill that would have exposed the hypocrisy of local governments relative to revenues and safety by requiring all revenues after expenses remitted to the state for use in youth programs. Not surprisingly, it was shunted to a committee that could sit on it.

This year, he sponsored SB 138 which would have allowed for state to license cameras when consistent with federal zone marking regulation and remove the Opelousas exception, which Cathey had said the previous year he would propose after a year. As little as the bill overall moved the ball, it failed in committee because of another bill that would accomplish largely the same thing except removing the exception, which was the only point of contention.

If this was a failure to take a step forward, at least legislators prevented a step backwards, if not for the best reason. With the camel’s nose under the tent as the compromise to get the bill passed last year, here came GOP state Rep. Vincent Cox with HB 1159 that would carve out an exception for Jefferson Parish. It featured the same game plan brought by SB 138 opponents, where the elected chief of police of Opelousas had testified how efficient and life-saving it was for his department, with plenty of other local law enforcement officials backing him.

Thus, for Cox’s bill a parade of parish officials, in testimony and through pledged support, ran the same arguments: the cameras relieved officers of that duty so they could do other presumably higher-value policing and Jefferson Parish would be safer on the roads and elsewhere, and otherwise they didn’t have the money (or cooperation with the Jefferson Parish School Board, they claimed) to do all of this. They asserted speeding on state highways were a problem in Harahan and Gretna that once had the cameras, although the bill applied to the entire parish. Cox denied the inborn and unstoppable impulse of local governments to abuse the system, asserting that somehow Jefferson governments would avoid becoming a “bad actor.”

Yet part of their argument also centered on relitigating the past couple of years, saying that local governments should have the option of these devices outside of school zones and those operative hours. Indeed, Cox publicly stated he wanted to repeal Cathey’s previous acts.

Therein lay the problem, as House Transportation, Highways, and Public Works Committee Chairman Republican state Rep. Ryan Bourriaque noted: if once is not enough, a thousand times is not too many. Although he expressed sympathy with the cause, to avoid opening a “Pandora’s box” on the House floor with a blizzard of amendments he arranged for a voluntary deferral of the bill (meaning it could be brought up again but is highly unlikely).

But that chaos argument is not a principled reason to toss bills like this into the round file. In essence, if there are multiple exceptions, that jettisons the principle that governments cannot be trusted not to use these devices as revenue-generators – unless Cox and anybody else wanting to make an exception has as part of that making it illegal for a local government to retain any more of the proceeds than those needed to pay off the verifiable and direct expenses associated with camera operation (a violation of which subjects officials to penalties outlined as in Cathey’s bill from last year). No such offer came from him.

The larger lesson in this is to remove the temptation in the first place, the Opelousas exception. Hopefully, next year legislators on this issue will grow a spine akin to Cathey’s and do precisely that.