The Virginia Court of Appeals on Monday heard arguments on whether the city of Suffolk can be sued over its system to use cameras to catch speeders.
Attorney Tim Anderson said Suffolk raked in $10 million last year after a third party vendor issued some 130,000 citations from cameras set up in work zones, school zones and other local roadways.
But the city is breaking state law in the process, Anderson contends.
The law, he said, requires that the alleged speeders be issued a court-issued summons — complete with a court date — for a judge to hear the cases.
Instead, Suffolk — like several other jurisdictions across the state — is allowing third-party vendors to send citations to hundreds of thousands of motorists, without summonses or court dates.
The cities do allow the alleged speeders to challenge their cases in court, but only if they ask for that specifically.
And that’s not good enough, Anderson asserts.
“You’re supposed to get the court date when the ticket’s issued … and you’re supposed to pay the fines to the court,” he said in an interview Monday. “But they’re bypassing the courts entirely, and they’re letting this third-party vendor just issue a ticket in the mail.”
After the motorist pays the vendor, that company then takes a cut — amounting to about 12% of the ticket — and sends the rest to the city.
Anderson said localities are treating the camera enforcement of speeding laws just as they treat red light cameras — even as the laws between the two kinds of camera systems are very different.
Anderson filed lawsuits representing one speed camera violator in Suffolk and another in Chesapeake, alleging that the cities are circumventing state law.
But Circuit Court judges in both cities, he said, quickly shut him down, saying the cities hold “sovereign immunity” from the joint lawsuits.
But Anderson took the Suffolk case to the Court of Appeals, contending there’s no such immunity because the cameras are serving a “proprietary function” — a way to raise millions of dollars.
“It’s a profit policing system run by a third-party company, not the city,” Anderson said. “So we’re asking the court to find that that’s an exception to sovereign immunity.”
Monday’s hearing was held in Williamsburg Circuit Court before a three-judge panel from the Virginia Court of Appeals: Judges Frank K. Friedman, Mary B. Malveaux and William G. Petty.
Anderson contended the case should be sent back to Suffolk, where he could argue that the city isn’t following state law.
But Assistant Suffolk City Attorney Rebecca Powers said that the Circuit Court ruling must stand. The city’s immunity, she said, arises from the fact that the enforcement of speeding laws is a core governmental function — public safety.
“The whole purpose is to make these high-risk areas safer,” she told the panel.
She noted that Suffolk police officers are involved in the review process for issuing the citations. Of the 45,932 citations the third party sought in one period of time, she said, Suffolk Police rejected 18,000 of them.
Petty asked several questions about the fact that Anderson brought the lawsuit on behalf of resident Curtis David Lytle separately from the process for challenging his ticket in court.
In other words, the judge suggested the lawyer could have made the same argument before a judge in the Suffolk speeding case.
“There were avenues where (Lytle) could have challenged the ticket,” Powers said.
After the hearing, Anderson acknowledged he could have gone that route.
But he said the third party’s speeding citation “wasn’t a lawful demand” for money in the first place — so court intervention here is entirely appropriate.
“A citizen should be able to go to the courts and say, ‘Hey, the government’s not acting right,’” Anderson said. “Don’t tell me I’m breaking the law while you’re breaking the law.”
Several localities in Virginia — including in Hampton Roads — are now using cameras for speed enforcement. The region’s largest locality, Virginia Beach, recently authorized their usage.
Anderson noted that if Suffolk followed the law as it should have, the courts would not be able to handle the volume of speeding cases.
“They couldn’t dump 130,000 tickets in Suffolk into the General District Court,” Anderson said. “There’s not enough courtrooms, there’s not enough judges, there’s not enough clerks.”
But the $10 million the city raised, he said, “is not chump change.”
“They’ve figured out a way to maximize the revenue,” he said. “Once the door got open, they realized they could make millions and millions and millions of dollars in revenue.”
And other cities, he said, “are doing it the exact same way.”
In the recent General Assembly session, Anderson said, there was a bill that would have required flashing electronic lights to warn drivers of speed enforcement cameras.
That was on top of the non-electronic signage required now.
“And the localities went nuts” and killed the bill, he said in the interview. “Because they don’t really want people to slow down at the school zones or the work zones. They want the revenue.”
Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, [email protected]
Originally Published: