

Need for Speeders Puts Tiny Florida City on Brink of Erasure - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/us/need-for-speeders-puts-tiny-florida-city-on-brink-of-erasure.html?hp

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tokenadult
A friend commented on Facebook as I posted another story about this town in
Florida, "Strongly supports sending all traffic fines to help repay the
federal deficit. End of corrupt traffic stops."

The CNN story

[http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida-
corrupt...](http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida-corruption/)

gives a lot of details of the history of the town that gains most of its
revenues from traffic stops, with a lot of on-the-ground reporting about local
conditions.

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protomyth
"Even State Representative Charles E. Van Zant Sr., who represents Hampton and
spearheaded the audit, got a speeding ticket here in 2011. (He said his
speeding ticket — which he paid — had nothing to do with ordering the audit.)"

I'm not sure his statement is quite true.

I'm still convinced that no money from speeding tickets or fines should go to
the city's budget, and I am more and more sure that city cops shouldn't be
allowed to ticket anyone on a highway, even it goes through their town. The
temptation to pull this stunt is too much.

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ufmace
I went to school in Florida a while back. The nearby city of Waldo was then
notorious for being funded by speed traps. It went as far as people making
T-Shirts saying "Don't speed in Waldo" and the AAA buying a billboard on both
sides of the town warning about it. Maybe they need to rework the law so that
traffic fines go to the state instead of the city.

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nobleach
Waldo, Lawtey, and Hampton are the speed traps along that stretch of road
between Gainesville and Jacksonville. There was a big uproar to take those
signs down a few years back. The signs actually slowed people down... which I
THOUGHT was the safe thing to do. But apparently, nobody really wanted to keep
children that had wandered off the Super Wal-mart parking lot to be safe. They
wanted a bigger fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

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jessaustin
I guess we're a _bit_ less vindictive in Missouri. We didn't dissolve Macks
Creek, we just redirected traffic fines to the local school district and let
it wither away.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macks_Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macks_Creek)

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coldcode
If anyone had actually challenged a speeding ticket, the scam might have been
caught earlier. I doubt anyone there had any training or probably even
understood calibration. But people generally just pay it and move on.

~~~
jasomill
It's even worse than that. I once got pulled over in a small town for a
rolling stop, and the officer basically said that I had two options — either
he could write me three tickets — one for running a stop sign, one for
disregarding a mechanical signal (flashing red light), and one for speeding
("nearly 25" in a 20, he claimed) — that added up to nearly $400 in fines and
several points on my license, or else I could agree, right then and there, to
show up in person at the county courthouse within 30 days and pay a $100
"fee", that "wasn't a fine", so, while it couldn't be contested, it also
wouldn't show up on my driving record.

In other words, if I was willing and able to show up in court, I may as well
just agree to pay the $100, because, bullshit speeding ticket aside and
regardless of the truth of the matter * , it's sort of pointless to argue in
court that, in spite of the officer's testimony, I did, in fact, come to a
complete stop — the only way I could have avoided >$100 in fines is if the
officer hadn't testified at all, which, without familiarity with the
particular jurisdiction or considerable research, isn't a very safe bet, and
certainly not one I was willing to make on the side of the road at 3:00am with
no time to think it over.

* Truth be told, I may well have roll-stopped, as I was making a right turn at a four-way stop with no other traffic and perfect visibility in a 20MPH zone at 3:00am, and I probably was driving 25 in a 20 at some point, because I don't regularly calibrate my speedometer or watch my speed _that_ closely, and it was one of those small towns where the speed limit drops from 55 to 20 in the course of a few blocks.

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dubfan
It sounds very likely that this town will go the way of New Rome, Ohio:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Thats the best one yet. Its true, you cant make that stuff up!

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danso
Extremely small jurisdictions (populations of fewer than 1,000) that are
incorporated as cities are _highly entertaining_...They get all the minimum
level of bureaucracy and powers of big cities, but not necessarily the
qualified people to fill the elected or hired positions.

At the Sacramento newspaper that I used to work at, we had a river city of
about 750 residents that often merited a reporter or two to cover the flurry
of governmental activity (and grand jury investigations) that came out of
there. One of the ongoing situations was that, as a city, it had its own
police chief, which meant that it could dispense conceal-carry-weapon permits
-- to basically anyone in the entire county. So the city could fund a
substantial amount of its yearly budget by just selling permits to people who
couldn't get them from bigger cities who were more reluctant about CCW
applications.

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voidlogic
Where I live there are tons of small 600-1000 person cities, there is even a
nearby county where the largest city (the county seat) is ~3,000 people. They
all seem operate without issue. I think you are just biased living in an area
with much larger metro areas. One small city near me has been stable at around
600 since the 1860's...

~~~
danso
This is true...the area I was talking about was Sacramento County:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_County,_California#I...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_County,_California#Incorporated_places)

Isleton, the city of under 1,000, is one of seven cities in the county, the
next smallest of which is 60,000+. It is about 1.5 magnitudes smaller than
each of its neighbors, which means some of its professional staff (such as the
manager) are likely to not live in the community and will have a different
dynamic.

(I'm also from a rural state where the average city/town is probably about <
2,000.)

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quahaug
This is ridiculous. It's like something out of Smokey and The Bandit, or The
Dukes of Hazard, or maybe Super Troopers. (meow)

