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Thursday
March 18, 2010 Since 1922 |
No longer red all over
By Jane Howard Lee
Contributor Published November 5, 2009 There is good news for anyone who is not a fan of red-light cameras.
Voters in College Station voted Tuesday to abolish the cameras at their city’s intersections.
The issue won by a very narrow margin – the percentages were 52 percent to abolish the cameras and 48 percent to retain use of the cameras.
A citizen-led political action group worked like madmen to get the issue before the voters. They gathered information, sought publicity, crafted a petition that would force their city council to put the issue to voters, worked like crazy to get signatures on that petition, then finally presented the petition to city officials.
The issue went on the Nov. 3 ballot as a proposition to ban red-light cameras. A “yes” vote supported that proposition while a “no” vote indicated that the voter wanted to keep the red-light cameras in place.
The actual vote came in with 4,077 voting yes and 3,805 voting no.
Now as soon as the election results are ruled official, the red-light cameras will be turned off and the signs relating to them will be removed.
Within a reasonable time, the company that put the cameras up – American Traffic Solutions – will be expected to remove all their equipment from College Station intersections.
So the fight against the cameras in College Station succeeded.
Things are not going quite so good for the folks fighting the red-light camera program here in Baytown.
Byron Schirmbeck has been leading that fight, gathering supporters along the way.
Schirmbeck discovered that the yellow-light intervals were too short at some of the Baytown red-light intersections and provided information on that issue to city officials.
The result was a change in some of the yellow-light intervals. One of those was at Garth and West Baker.
He’s keeping an eye on those yellow lights, though, and told me recently that the interval at one intersection — Garth and West Baker — has been dropped back down from 4.5 seconds to 4.0 seconds, which he says is an unacceptable interval of time for an intersection in a 45-mph zone.
The Baytown fight goes on.
So far Schirmbeck has about 500 signatures on a petition that will ask city officials to do away with the red-light camera program or at least put it on an election ballot and let voters decide.
He’s running into problems with that as well. He told me “we went into a holding pattern about a month ago when Ignacio (Baytown City Attorney Ignacio Ramirez) offered to review the petition to make sure there would be no objections. He put me off for over three weeks saying that he was still researching the petition, then he came back and said that it was not legal and that he could not tell me why.”
Apparently telling Schirmbeck why the petition is not legal would constitute giving legal advice and the attorney for the city cannot give legal advice to a citizen, or something like that.
Complicated stuff.
So Schirmbeck is waiting now for an opinion on the petition from another attorney who is familiar with municipal law before deciding what to do with the petition.
He said that most likely the petition will be turned in the way it is to at least put it in the city’s hands.
“The council can hide behind the city attorney if they want, but they don’t have to accept his opinion. They can adopt the petition anyway or they could even vote the red-light camera program out on their own without it going to the ballot.”
For more information about movement against Baytown’s red-light camera program, you can e-mail Schirmbeck at baytownredlightcamera(at)yahoo.com.
He says he is working on a website and on setting up a PAC (political action committee) and still has people going around neighborhoods gathering signatures for the petition. In the near future he and his supporters plan to hold some signature drives but locations and dates are not available yet.
Jane Howard Lee is a reporter for The Baytown Sun.
Contributor Published November 5, 2009 There is good news for anyone who is not a fan of red-light cameras.
Voters in College Station voted Tuesday to abolish the cameras at their city’s intersections.
The issue won by a very narrow margin – the percentages were 52 percent to abolish the cameras and 48 percent to retain use of the cameras.
A citizen-led political action group worked like madmen to get the issue before the voters. They gathered information, sought publicity, crafted a petition that would force their city council to put the issue to voters, worked like crazy to get signatures on that petition, then finally presented the petition to city officials.
The issue went on the Nov. 3 ballot as a proposition to ban red-light cameras. A “yes” vote supported that proposition while a “no” vote indicated that the voter wanted to keep the red-light cameras in place.
The actual vote came in with 4,077 voting yes and 3,805 voting no.
Now as soon as the election results are ruled official, the red-light cameras will be turned off and the signs relating to them will be removed.
Within a reasonable time, the company that put the cameras up – American Traffic Solutions – will be expected to remove all their equipment from College Station intersections.
So the fight against the cameras in College Station succeeded.
Things are not going quite so good for the folks fighting the red-light camera program here in Baytown.
Byron Schirmbeck has been leading that fight, gathering supporters along the way.
Schirmbeck discovered that the yellow-light intervals were too short at some of the Baytown red-light intersections and provided information on that issue to city officials.
The result was a change in some of the yellow-light intervals. One of those was at Garth and West Baker.
He’s keeping an eye on those yellow lights, though, and told me recently that the interval at one intersection — Garth and West Baker — has been dropped back down from 4.5 seconds to 4.0 seconds, which he says is an unacceptable interval of time for an intersection in a 45-mph zone.
The Baytown fight goes on.
So far Schirmbeck has about 500 signatures on a petition that will ask city officials to do away with the red-light camera program or at least put it on an election ballot and let voters decide.
He’s running into problems with that as well. He told me “we went into a holding pattern about a month ago when Ignacio (Baytown City Attorney Ignacio Ramirez) offered to review the petition to make sure there would be no objections. He put me off for over three weeks saying that he was still researching the petition, then he came back and said that it was not legal and that he could not tell me why.”
Apparently telling Schirmbeck why the petition is not legal would constitute giving legal advice and the attorney for the city cannot give legal advice to a citizen, or something like that.
Complicated stuff.
So Schirmbeck is waiting now for an opinion on the petition from another attorney who is familiar with municipal law before deciding what to do with the petition.
He said that most likely the petition will be turned in the way it is to at least put it in the city’s hands.
“The council can hide behind the city attorney if they want, but they don’t have to accept his opinion. They can adopt the petition anyway or they could even vote the red-light camera program out on their own without it going to the ballot.”
For more information about movement against Baytown’s red-light camera program, you can e-mail Schirmbeck at baytownredlightcamera(at)yahoo.com.
He says he is working on a website and on setting up a PAC (political action committee) and still has people going around neighborhoods gathering signatures for the petition. In the near future he and his supporters plan to hold some signature drives but locations and dates are not available yet.
Jane Howard Lee is a reporter for The Baytown Sun.