KENT—The Board of Selectmen have called a public hearing for Friday, Nov. 22, at 7 p.m. at town hall to present a proposed ordinance allowing installation of traffic speed cameras.
First Selectman Marty Lindenmayer said bids for the cameras and monitoring service will be put out to bid as soon as townspeople give approval for the project.
He estimated that the cameras could be installed next spring in time for the tourist season.
He told his board during a special meeting Nov. 12 that the cameras automatically issue tickets for cars exceeding the speed limit by 10 miles per hour or more.
Signage would alert motorists that their speed is being monitored. All infractions would be reviewed and corroborated by a monitoring company before tickets are sent out.
The penalty for speeding would be $50 plus a $15 processing fee. Lindenmayer said the processing fee would help the town recoup some of the cost of the monitoring service. The tickets would not put points on the car owner’s license or permanent record.
Kent, an increasingly popular destination town is bisected by busy Route 7 north and south and by Route 341 east and west. Routes 7 and 341 are state roads.
The volume of traffic, which often exceeds the speed limit in town, and the number of pedestrians crossing from one side of the road to the other, raises real safety concerns, particularly on weekends.
This past spring, at the town’s request, speed limits at the entrances to town were reduced to 25 miles per hour. Data monitors were also temporarily installed to measure the volume and speed of traffic in the town.
While the lower speed limits give motorists plenty of warning to slow down in the village center, Lindenmayer and Selectman Glenn Sanchez both cited personal experiences with aggressive drivers.
Sanchez recounted one car that pulled around his own vehicle to speed down the street. “Unbelievable,” he said. “If there had been a pedestrian jaywalking, we could have had an accident. From the start, it’s a safety issue.”
But the installation of the cameras remains controversial. Selectman Lynn Mellis Worthington urged Lindenmayer to have statistics for the hearing about traffic flow, the number of tickets that might be issued and what the revenues for fines might be used for.
“I think we will get push back from the money point of view,” she predicted. “I have heard complaints that this is just another way to tax people. That has never been our goal. This is what will happen [if people speed], but it’s always been about safety and not a money-making endeavor.”
“If you can offer an estimate of how many citations there might be and the estimated revenue based on that, then if we can say, ‘We would like to do X, Y and Z based on what we collect,” Worthington said.
Lindenmayer pointed out that the fines have to be put in a fund for maintenance of the town’s traffic program. “It can’t go to salaries or general elections,” he said. “It could go toward crosswalks or better signage.”
During public comments, Suzanne Charity expressed her dislike for the idea of cameras. She objects to tickets being issued to vehicle owners rather than the drivers. “There’s something in my mind that’s not really fair about that,” she said.
She recounted her own experience of being fined for an infraction that occurred while she was overseas, and her car was being used by someone else.
“We tried to appeal and had our passports to show we were not in the country,” she said, “but it didn’t do any good.”
She urged the selectmen to look for other ways of slowing traffic through town, such as signs that alert motorists to how much they are above the speed limit.
She prophesied that Kent could get a “reputation as a town that makes revenue from speeding tickets.”
“That’s not good for the town,” she said. “I totally support promoting safety, but we should find a way to slow people down without punishing people trying to get to their weekend homes.”
