A plan to triple the number of speeding tickets issued in Sault Ste. Marie using city-leased automated speed cameras came to a screeching halt last night.
Earlier this year, city council threw its support behind a speed-management scheme intended to nab speedsters in community safety zones and school zones, using four automated speed enforcement cameras from Redflex Traffic Systems (Canada) Ltd.
That would have generated 20,000 new speeding tickets a year, on top of the 7,000 already issued in the city.
At Monday's city council budget session, CAO Tom Vair recommended a one-time expenditure of $110,000 to develop an administrative monetary penalty system (AMPS) to handle the tsunami of new offences.
Vair expected the $110,000 would be easily offset by $145,000 in anticipated revenue from the new tickets.
But there are only three employees in the local Provincial Offences Act office (POA) and there's no way they could handle the added workload.
So, Vair proposed eventually adding two new clerical staff and one mandatory screening officer, using money raised from all those new speeding tickets.
This time, council hit the brakes.
Ward 1 Coun. Sonny Spina, who spent two decades working as a city police officer, said automated speed cameras won't stop speeders, just move them to other parts of the city.
"These units will 100 per cent divert drivers to other areas. They will simply displace speeders from one area where this unit is posted to another," Spina said.
"If that were not true, then I wouldn't be able to drive with my iPhone in my hand and have it send me a message automatically that says: 'Speed trap ahead. Slow down or divert your path.' That's happening today in everyone's phone in every community across Ontario and across Canada."
"The #1 thing we can do to address speeders in our community is to leave it in the hands of the people who are authorized to enforce it.
"The second thing is, these automated units have absolutely zero discretion. A police officer doing traffic duties or traffic enforcement has discretion. Someone is racing to get their wife to the hospital because she's pregnant. Someone is racing to get their loved one to the hospital. There's discretion there. They're not going to get a ticket. They're probably going to get escorted to the hospital."
Spina said the gold standard of speed enforcement is a trained traffic cop.
"Someone who is there to provide for the safety of the community, and someone who is dynamic and has discretion in order to best serve the community in those functions," he said.
"I think we need to leave this enforcement where it belongs, leave it with the police service. They are the experts. Allow them to do it. It's not city council's job to get into the policing of this in our community," Coun. Spina said.
Mayor Matthew Shoemaker also opposed the AMPS purchase.
"If we use Pine Street as an example, people will avoid that by using Willow or by using Lake," the mayor said.
"I think that using this type of speed enforcement will not generate the revenue that we want to see, but will generate all the cost that's associated with it. And I think it's a lot of additional cost for not much monetary gain.
"There are better ways to speed enforcement. What you could do through environmental design, is, in my view, the appropriate way to do speed enforcement. It does take longer to implement throughout the community, but it gets you better results overalll," Shoemaker said.
Voting to kill the administrative automated penalty system, council proceeded to approve a 2025 budget with a 3.68 per cent levy increase.