These are extraordinary times. Our municipal budget is threadbare and the village is struggling to find money to operate. Talk has turned, and a budget of $160,000 has been allocated to put red light cameras at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Winfield Road. The move is billed as being in the “best interest of public safety” but if you listen to the discussions about it at the village budget meeting, and I have, it’s all about the money. In your average eight hour period one study showed that there were 50 violations. Out of these violations, all but one were for either not stopping behind the white line or not coming to a complete stop on red, when making a right hand turn. These offenses are petty at best and relatively low in value for protecting public safety. As for the one person who ran the red light and could have caused a T-Bone at that intersection, chances are that they were distracted anyway and having a camera wouldn’t have been a deterrent anyway. If red light cameras were truly about public safety, you could put an empty box on a pole and place a sign that claimed you had a red light camera and achieve the same effect of safety for about 1/160th of the cost.
The cameras are estimated to make $17,000 per month, per intersection. That’s $204,000 per year of discretionary funds for the village but one has to wonder about the philosophy of a government setting what is essentially a regulatory trap for their own citizens for express purpose of revenue generation. It conjures images of small town back woods banana republics that use their police powers to find the smallest infractions when tourists pass through which they harvest for budget money. All because the town has no industry outside of petty police enforcement. If setting pedantic traps is an acceptable revenue generator for a village, then how about we ban wearing clothing of specific colors on different days of the week. We won’t tell you what colors or days but as you know ignorance of the law is no excuse. That will be $50 dollar fine please…
There is a bit of Confucius wisdom that seems apropos here, “The dog that does not bark is the hardest to hear.” Currently, the dog that doesn’t bark is fact, that the reason we are setting regulatory traps for our own citizens is we are out of money due to a very long and storied history of turning away revenue generating development projects in Winfield. Projects which could have generated commercial real estate tax dollars and better yet, retail sales tax dollars. We currently have the largest swath of Roosevelt Road between the Lake Michigan and the City of Elburn that is not only undeveloped for commercial purposes but is also not zoned properly to EVER be a revenue generator for our village.
So when you are paying that $100 bill for only stopping for 1 second instead of 2 when making that right turn on to Winfield from Roosevelt, know that your politicians are using that camera to make a trade-off between sustainable revenue generation by growth and keeping our most promising retail corridor barren. I hope the citizens remember how it feels to have the budget balanced on their backs when it comes time to vote.
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