Scottsdale is quietly refunding fines from 1,964 photo radar traffic tickets Original Article SNIP Ticket to Ride The timing couldn't have been worse. This month, the Scottsdale City Council was faced with voting on whether to go ahead with a pilot project to pioneer photo radar cameras on Loop 101. The Bird supposes that, by now, everyone has gotten used to the pesky red-light cameras now in place in Valley cities from Paradise Valley to Chandler, but Scottsdale's program will mark the first time that cameras will be used to catch speeders on a U.S. freeway. And so let's just say that Scottsdale couldn't have been happy to admit that, in the very same month that it's authorizing unprecedented use of photo radar surveillance, it's also quietly refunding fines from 1,964 traffic tickets mistakenly issued to its citizens. You read that right: 1,964 drivers were wrongly ticketed in Scottsdale. And because everyone knows there's no use fighting a photo ticket, a good chunk of those poor saps -- no one at City Hall seems to know exactly how many -- went ahead and paid up. Ouch! You know how it goes: There you are, sailing along at a modest 20 miles over the speed limit, when you're zapped by a flash of light. A month later you get a citation with your beaming mug bearing the official record that you were driving 55 in a 35 zone. Well, what The Bird heard is that every one of those photo tickets issued is supposed to have the date, time and speed stamped in a "data bar" across the damning photograph. But as Bruce Kalin, the program contract administrator for Scottsdale, explains, the city's photo radar vendor, hometown company RedFlex, was jiggling with the software in one of its mobile photo radar vans and, somehow, said software was mistakenly changed so that it deleted that little data bar that lists date, time and speed. That happened in July. And although someone is supposed to check every citation to make sure it's got that key date-time-speed information, that someone didn't catch the problems affecting the van in question until October -- almost four months later. At which point, the city figured it had a problem. "If that [time and mph] information isn't there, it's technically not a photo that can be used as evidence," Kalin told The Bird. Which must mean that all those tickets are inadmissible in traffic court. Which could, of course, lead to something this extended third finger dearly loves -- a great big scandal! And so Scottsdale began quietly mailing refunds. "Anybody who paid will be refunded," Kalin vowed to this faux falcon. "If they went to driver's school, that will be refunded. We're also refunding process-server fees." Kalin says the city isn't out a dime. The refunds are being paid by the city's outside contractor, RedFlex, since it's the one that screwed up. Damn! The Bird was hoping that greedy Snottsdale would get punished for its damnable money-grubbing policies! Scottsdale Councilman Jim Lane, an outspoken critic of the Loop 101 plan, says he was first informed of the refunds by a constituent who'd just gotten his money back -- and, naturally, that guy wasn't calling to complain. "He was delighted," Lane says. But the plumed one's still guessing there are some people who aren't. Like the people who sat through six hours of traffic school only to be told they'd wasted their time. Sure, they get their money back, but what about those six hours of their lives? Can you say pain and suffering? None of this much fazed the City Council majority, which went ahead and approved the Loop 101 plan. The city's now estimating that the new cameras will nab 198,500 speeders a year -- which means no one should cry for RedFlex. The company gets $42.48 per citation, which could mean $8.4 million for RedFlex in the first full year of operation. It can afford to make a couple of thousand refunds, fuck you very much! SNIP