Daily Herald opinion: ‘Operational challenges’: Revenues still seem the priority even as red-light camera use declines

Since the inception of photo enforcement of speed limits and red lights, local officials using it have praised the technology for its potential to make roadways safer. A skeptical public never really bought that line of thinking and often point to a huge influx of revenues from fines as evidence that the cameras were being used more for collecting cash than bolstering safety.

So, there were likely few teary eyes following our Jake Griffin’s report Sunday that more and more towns are cutting back or eliminating their red-light camera operations.

And, there is something unfortunate about that. For, surely, camera enforcement can have a role to play in monitoring dangerous conditions and managing unsafe intersections. Yet, that has rarely seemed to be the priority in the management of the technology.

Indeed, among the departments Griffin profiled, the loss of revenue and the hassles of dealing with a slow-moving state bureaucracy seemed to have a greater influence on the decisions to eliminate cameras than any real or perceived safety improvements.

Gurnee Village Manager Pat Muetz said changes in driver behavior and reduction in crashes played a role in the decision to deactive cameras in the village after 16 years, but perhaps less than “operational challenges” the village faced getting Department of Transportation approval to reinstate cameras that had been shut down during construction projects.

“It was a combination of both, but probably more having the cameras offline,” he said.

Griffin reported that a program that once produced as much as $1 million in fines for the village had softened to just $400,000 last year.

Palatine officials complained in their budget book that they have been waiting two years for IDOT certification of a new vendor for its cameras and finally “eliminated this revenue source from the budget.”

Griffin cited a village report that found red-light camera revenues in Palatine fell from $300,000 in 2021 to less than $13,000 last year.

“These revenues are a significant portion of our funding of the Police Department,” the budget book states.

Hanover Park Village President Rodney Craig said his village turned its red-light cameras back on earlier this month after a two-year holdup during road-improvement work. The village’s red-light camera revenues fell from $140,000 in 2021 to just $2,000 last year, Griffin found.

Officials from local villages repeated suspicions that IDOT, as Craig speculated, “has had a lot of conflict internally about using them, apparently.” And it’s easy to understand local leaders’ frustrations with a bureaucracy that seems indifferent to their interests.

It would be easier to sympathize, though, if officials tried to make a stronger case for safety than for finances. When a village is relying for “a significant portion” of its police budget on a resource that, in theory, ought to be steadily declining, it gives little confidence that the underlying motivation is safety.

Nor have community leaders been particularly transparent in reporting the material impact of the cameras compared to their costs, in spite of legal requirements that they do so. And IDOT, which must approve the use of the cameras, doesn’t maintain records of crash data at locations equipped with them. What local records do exist, offer a mixed bag of evidence, ranging from towns that have seen significant improvements at certain sites to others that have actually seen crashes increase at red-light camera locations.

The bottom line is that the apparent steady demise of the technology will be greeted as weirdly good news, despite a lost opportunity to make a material difference in driver behaviors. Perhaps if IDOT and local communities thought more in those terms, they would make better use of a potentially valuable technology and provide important reassurance to a doubting public.