Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Some four months after the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) implemented a traffic detail to curtail speeding and ensure for a safer driving environment, Sheriff Mac McNeill reported to county officials that the program was doing well.
McNeill told the Jefferson County Commission on Thursday evening, Aug. 5, that the detail had generated $23,331 in traffic citations between March 29 and June 13 of this year.
Of which amount, he said, the county had gotten $9,344. Considering that it cost the county $2,518 to put two deputies on the job during the period, it’s not a bad return on the county’s investment.
“We figure that for every dollar that the county spends, it gets three dollars in return,” is the way that McNeill put it.
He explained that the program is voluntary. The deputies, he said, do the traffic detail as an extra duty and get paid overtime. So far, he said, two deputies had consistently volunteered for the program.
But he suspected, McNeill said, that once the NextEra transmission line installation project is completed, more deputies would be participating in the traffic detail.
The reason that more deputies weren’t currently volunteering, he said, is that NextEra pays $40 per hour for traffic control, whereas the hourly overtime rate for deputies is much less.
“But once the power line is finished, the traffic detail should see a big increase,” McNeil said.
He reiterated that while the detail generates revenue, its main objective is to slow speeders on the interstate and create a safer driving environment. The department, he said, had no interest in benefiting from ticketing local residents.
Even so, if a commissioner or citizen complained about a speeding problem on a county road, the department would work to correct the problem, he said. Preferably, McNeill said, his department would issue warnings to local speeders. If, however, the problem persisted and an individual was a repeat offender, then yes, the individual would be issued a citation, he said.
The hope, McNeil said, was the department would one day be large enough to be able to dedicate more time and deputies to monitoring traffic. But for the present, he said, the department was too small to put the necessary effort into such an endeavor, other than on a voluntary basis.
At the time that the Jefferson County Commission approved the traffic detail on April 1, McNeill shared the results of a three-month pilot program that his department had tested.
The figures showed that it had cost $1,307.80 in salary and equipment for one deputy to focus on speeding violations. During the period, the deputy had written 69 citations, of which at least seven had been tossed out and two had had the charges reduced.
Bottom line, the figures showed that the county’s three-month share of tickets revenues – after deducting the shares of the state and other agencies, as statutorily mandated – had come to $5,123.66, after subtracting the deputy’s cost.
Typically, deputies work six-hour shifts on a voluntary basis monitoring traffic in problematic areas of the county or on the interstate.
The commission voted to put $20,000 into the program for starters, to see how it would work out.