red light cameras
Redflex Traffic Systems of Arizona, one of two red-light cameras in New Jersey, bribed officials in 13 states, including New Jersey, a fired executive contends in a lawsuit.
(Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger)
In recent years the government has mounted what amounts to a shakedown racket of the driving public. One of the worst excesses is the red-light camera. Under the guise of promoting safety, local officials are picking motorists' pockets.
Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon has been mounting a one-man campaign against these cameras. Here's how the Monmouth County Republican reacted after news surfaced of allegations that officials from the camera companies were bribing local politicians to have them installed:
Assemblyman Declan O'Scanlon issued the following statement on the recent indictment of a former Redflex CEO on charges she and a top Chicago City Hall manager conspired to rig the camera business for a decade. Karen Finley, a Redflex executives who was let go amid the scandal, was indicted for her alleged involvement in a $2 million bribery scheme that ran from 2002 until 2012:
Well this is a shocking turn of events,said no one! If cameras actually increased safety no one would have to bribe anyone for business - we'd all be lining up! How any public entity can continue to do business with Redflex in particular, but really any of these companies pitching these ineffective, thieving cameras is beyond me. Is the lure of fast cash so strong we have decided that morality doesn't matter? We now have multiple pieces of evidence of corruption reaching the highest levels of one of the two companies operating these cameras in New Jersey. Both companies are guilty of blatantly lying about their products and misrepresenting data.”
In the winter a former top salesman for Redflex admitted to bestowing gifts and bribes on officials in dozens of municipalities within, but not limited to the following states: California, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia. He said Redflex bribed local officials with meals, golf outings and tickets to professional football and baseball games. The expenses were listed as categories such as “entertainment” and “celebratory tokens, according to a law suit filed in Arizona this February.
“This type of practice is apparently standard operating procedure for these guys. The fact that the indicted executive said he had first hand knowledge of bribes and/or gifts given to local officials in New Jersey municipalities can't help but destroy the credibility of any local official trying to make the case that the program is effective.
"The entire, tortured supposition of the red-light camera programs is that the cameras increase safety, we know that's not true, so outright corruption isn't that much of a stretch. This is exactly why we need to protect New Jersey drivers from these government-sponsored-scams in other jurisdictions! The cameras in New Jersey are bad, the cameras in Chicago are bad, they're all bad, and there is no exception to that rule. December 16th - the day the camera program in New Jersey will come to a merciful end - can't come soon enough."
All I can say is, amen brother! Now perhaps someone could look into those companies that get towns to boot cars illegally and shake the drivers down for a multi-hundred-dollar credit-card to get the boot removed.
Oh wait a minute. That happened in Hudson County. There's never been the tiniest hint of corruption there, has there?
Actually I call this kind of thing corrupt even if no bribe money changes hands. Towns should not be able to profit from law enforcement. All of the money collected should go into a fund on either the county or state level so there's no conflict of interest on the part of municipal officials.
That's the way things used to work in New Jersey, by the way, but some machine politicians from North Jersey had the law reversed several decades ago so their towns could generate more pork.
That law needs to be changed back. All of these abuses would disappear if the towns couldn't make a quick buck off them.
In other news, the New Jersey Watchdog website has done a great job of ferreting out double-dippers, particularly in the administration of the man who frequently rails against this abuse of the pension system.
Now it appears the Chris Christie administration is retaliating. Here's a press release straight from the dog's mouth:
The New York Press Club is publicly criticizing Gov. Chris Christie and his staff for blacklisting New Jersey Watchdog.
The journalists' organization “expresses its outrage over the Christie Administration's apparent ‘blacklisting’ of New Jersey Watchdog, in an effort to prevent the news outlet from receiving press advisories and official announcements from the governor's office,” said Press Club president Larry Seary.
The governor and his staff have offered no explanation for excluding the investigative news site from official communications.
“One may infer that, by suppressing information, the Christie Administration may be attempting to hamper the efforts of New Jersey Watchdog's efforts to cover political news,” said Seary. “It is ironic that Chris Christie claims to be a champion of open government while allowing his staff to deny access to public information, which is already available to other news outlets.”
Chris Christie: His talk about abuse of the pension system would be more meaningful if he didn't have so many double-dippers in his administration.
In response, the web site has resorted to Open Public Records Act requests in an effort to combat Christie's selective government secrecy.
“New Jersey Watchdog is a legitimate, award-winning news outlet…” noted Seary. “It has been recognized for its journalistic achievements and its use of investigative journalism to ensure transparency and open government in New Jersey.
“I hope this decision is reconsidered before it becomes a larger issue of press freedom, and has to be resolved in the courts. Any denial of public information ultimately is harmful to our citizenry,” Seary concluded.
For more, go to the Watchdog's website.
On a related topic, here's an article about a former Robbinsville firefighter getting five years in jail for falsifying claims for $10,000 in vacation pay.
A couple of questions come to mind:
1. When I read of all the public officials pulling off various pension scams on the Watchdog site, I wonder how the heck this guy could get all that prison time for scamming such a relatively small amount.
2. Why does a small town like Robbinsville have paid firefighters in the first place? I recognize the need for professional firefighters in big cities with big buildings. But in towns that small, this just looks like a job program.
The town has only about 13,000 residents. My old home town of Toms River has eight times that many and has volunteer fire, as do many large townships in Ocean and Monmouth Counties.
This is the sort of thing that drives property taxes up, but you never hear it from the Trenton crowd that keeps pushing municipal consolidation.
The real goal of those people is not to drive property taxes down; it's to drive public employment up. The bigger the population, the easier it is to add expensive services and union jobs.
But the fact is it's the small towns, not the big cities, that have the lowest tax rates. And one key reason is that their citizens volunteer to do many things that are full-time jobs in the cities.