Amanda L. Myers, The Associated Press
December 30, 2009 - 9:15PM , updated: December 31, 2009 - 2:56PM
More than a year after Arizona became the first state in the country to deploy dozens of speed cameras on highways statewide, threats to the groundbreaking program abound.
Profits are far below expectations, a citizen effort to ban the cameras continues to gain steam, the governor has said she does not like the program, and more and more drivers getting tickets in the mail are ignoring them after hearing from fellow speeders that there are often no consequences to that choice.
"I see all the cameras in Arizona completely coming down (in 2010)," said Shawn Dow, chairman of Arizona Citizens Against Photo Radar, which is trying to get a voter initiative banning the cameras on the November ballot. "The citizens of Arizona took away the cash cow of Arizona by refusing to pay."
The Arizona Department of Public Safety introduced the cameras in September 2008 and slowly added more until all 76 were up and running by January. Supporters say the cameras slow down drivers and reduce accidents, while opponents argue that they are intrusive and are more about making money than safety.
More than 300 U.S. communities in 25 states use cameras similar to Arizona's, including New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. But the backlash seems to be particularly intense in Arizona.
Some people have shown their distaste with the cameras by covering them with boxes, sticky notes and Silly String. In a few locally infamous cases, one man took a pickax to a camera and another purposefully triggered the cameras dozens of times while wearing a monkey mask.
DPS Lt. Jeff King, photo enforcement district commander, said his agency just wants drivers to go the speed limit and doesn't understand all the backlash.
"Instead of spending so much time focusing on getting rid of cameras, why don't they focus on the real problem, the root problem, which is getting people to drive the speed limit?" he said. "If everyone was to drive the speed limit, the cameras would never flash."
More than 700,000 tickets were given out to drivers going 11 mph or more over the speed limit by the cameras between September 2008 and September this year, the most recent data available, according to DPS.
If the mandated $181.50 in fines and surcharges were collected on all those tickets, that would total more than $127 million. But they had generated just $36.8 million through September, King said.
Some of the people who got those tickets are contesting them in court and could end up having to pay the fine, but many of them have gone unpaid because drivers know they have a good shot at getting away with ignoring them.
When drivers get tickets, they have four options — pay without question, say they weren't driving and send in their driver's license photo as proof, request a court date and fight the ticket, or simply ignore the ticket because law enforcement can't prove they received it. The ticket becomes invalid if a violator who ignores it isn't served in person within three months.
It's nearly impossible to say how many people have ignored their tickets because courts don't track the figure. The number has been estimated to be as high as 70 percent.
Whatever the figure, overtaxed process servers can't get to most of those people, and many of the citations go unpaid.
That's part of the reason the speed cameras haven't made as much money as expected. While certain to increase, that $36.8 million in revenue through September will still fall far below the $120 million a year that former Gov. Janet Napolitano hoped to put in the state's coffers when she ordered DPS to develop the program in early 2007.
Camera operator Redflex may not even be breaking even. It cost the company $16 million to install the cameras, and they got $4.6 million back between September 2008 and June, King said.
In a statement to shareholders, Redflex executives said that they expected to make even less money on the program in the first half of the 2010 financial year than the same time period last year, estimating that the net profit before tax would be about $4 million. The executives partially cited people who aren't paying their tickets for the low revenue.
Reflex spokeswoman Shoba Vaitheeswaran said the company hopes to improve revenues by streamlining the process by which violators get their tickets, although she did not get into specifics, and added that a public-awareness campaign is a possibility.
"I should point out that Redflex is in this for the long haul," she said. "This is a massive, first-of-its-kind deployment which requires a large capital outlay of equipment, backend technology, etcetera ... We feel it's here to stay."
She said the company is confident that as the process is refined, more drivers will pay their tickets.
As for state revenues, King said Arizona's general fund got nearly $20 million from the speed cameras through September.
Paul Senseman, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, said while a far cry from what the previous administration had anticipated getting, "$20 million is a lot of money for anybody."
Brewer hasn't said what she would do with legislation stopping the program, which could be proposed in 2010, but has said she doesn't like the intrusiveness of the cameras.
"She believes the evidence is clear from the beginning that it was created more as a revenue source," Senseman said.
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