2y ago

This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.

www.propublica.org

Fenton, population 226, brings in over $1 million per year through its mayor’s court, an unusual justice system in which the mayor can serve as judge even though he’s responsible for town finances.

U.S. News @beehaw.org

Lee Duna @lemmy.nz

2y ago

This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.

www.propublica.org /article/fenton-louisiana-brought-in-1-million-through-mayors-court

News @lemmy.world

stopthatgirl7 @kbin.social

2y ago

This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.

www.propublica.org /article/fenton-louisiana-brought-in-1-million-through-mayors-court

115 comments

We held a hearing about whether or not the mayor should also be the Judge. The mayor has decided that the mayor runs the court impartially and there is no need for a 3rd party magistrate.
- “I’m the mayor after all”
- "I am the Senate!"
- So much freedom in communist Louisiana
  
  This isn't communism, it's totalitarianism..
  Very different thing.
  
  I'm not sure if you realize this but using that term when it's not really applicable looks silly. Using that term when it's 100% not remotely applicable makes you look like a moron.
  
  Define communism. Go ahead. Define it.
  
  ???? Mate you need to read something. I suggest starting with Cocomelon books. Since you clearly don't understand half the words you have used.
  
  Lol. What?
All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.
The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government's ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won't affect their traffic fines.
They've committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They've given up.
- It's a town of 226 people, I don't think they're too interested in urban development or anything that would involve taxes instead of extorting out of towners.
  
  Yes this village basically exists to give traffic tickets, and everyone else in the area hates them. Talking about building city infrastructure here is kind of absurd. Sure the mayor-judge could start attempting civil projects, but the 226 residents live there because of how things are now.
- They’re basically acting as modern day robber barons.
- It's Louisiana, they would go back to 1800 if they could.
- The cynic in me feels the need to point out that this is Louisiana we're taking about. This might be the most forward thinking policy they've had for decades.
I'm generally for local control over local matters, but this shit should be illegal at the federal level. The right to due process is impossible to implement when the executive and judicial branches are run by the same person.
- the most, worst, and most blatant corruption is usually in local government. it's just so much harder to get people to notice or care until it's like Flint Michigan water levels of bad.
  
  Flint's still fucked I believe.
  
  It's also much harder to investigate and shine a spotlight on it, since local news sources have been in decline for years. For many smaller metros, the only local news source may be a weekly newsletter or NPR affiliate, and those rarely have the investigative impact that an old-school local paper would have had, and small-town corruption has flourished like fungus in the dark.
- This is the exact all powerful executive situation the foundation intended to stop from ever happening.
in ohio ... and
seems like a clear conflict of interest to have a mayor adjudicating
- I found this telling (emphasis mine):
  Mayor’s courts operate in a gray area of Louisiana law. Like municipal courts, they handle violations of local ordinances. Municipal judges must hold a law degree and pass the bar; a mayor can preside over court without meeting any qualifications. Yet, like a municipal judge, a mayor can impose fines or sentence people to jail.
  Mayor’s courts must ensure defendants have fair trials. But unlike other courts in the state, they aren’t subject to rules like the Code of Criminal Procedure that are supposed to ensure courts are run fairly and properly.
  
  Wow. Truly land of the free. /s How is this permitted to go without consequences?
I’m from this area. A mayor got in trouble for embezzlement a few year ago. Look it up.
- Does this town have a reputation?
  
  Yep. Do not speed. You go 50.
the most expedient solution would be to drive nowhere near Fenton, LA
- This is impossible. You have no choice but to drive through Fenton to get to lake Charles without at least an hour detour through moss bluff. I live in this area and my in-laws live in Fenton (it’s bigger than it seems. The town itself is small but the surrounding area has lots of home. A lot more than 225 people in the town too.) You just don’t speed. You get a warning sign about it changing to 50. Go 50. I used to pick up my buddy in kinder, one town over heading to lake Charles for work, and we would wait to light the blunt till we passed though.
- I've seen this movie. Stars dan Aykroyd and John candy.
  
  Nothing But Trouble is the movie for those curious.
  
  Great movie, great actors.
- Or just not break the speed limit?
  I get the concerns about possible corruption (though the article didn't show us anything in this regard), but I'm like what's the problem? If you break the law you get a fine. I'd be more concerned about the paces where you don't!
  
  "Yeah, I clocked you going 20 over"
  "But I was driving the speed limit"
  "Take it up with the judge"
  ---Later---
  "You were going 20 over, pay at the desk"
  "But I was going the speed limit!"
  "Got any proof?"
  "No?"
  "Then go pay at the desk"
  
  I'm sure the only people getting ticketed are ones who have genuinely broken the law. There is no conflict of interest here at all.
  
  I live in Louisiana. Fenton is what's known here as a speed trap town.
  Except for the i-10, every major highway in LA has these. The trick is that the average speed limit on these highways is around 60 or 70, and then it drops to 30 or 40 for a mile stretch where cops are waiting for you just after the sign.
  If you missed the sign or haven't slowed down sufficiently by the time you reach it, they pull you over and write you a ticket for ~$600. I got one of these in 2018 for the latter reason.
  It's not just about obeying the speed limit. You can follow the speed limit to the letter and miss one sign on accident. It actually is a trap. It's a main source of income for the small towns along the highways of LA.
  
  The speed limit is often artificially low to entice people to speed though. Especially in towns like this that subsist off speeding fines.
  Back in 2007 a group of UGA students drove the 285 loop around Atlanta at exactly over the posted speed limit (at the time 55mph). This caused traffic to back up for hours and the teens were arrested for blocking the flow of traffic.
  And, from personal experience, driving on 285 at less than 70mph is absolutely terrifying. You're liable to get hit by someone who is just moving with the flow of traffic. It's substantially less safe to adhere to the posted speed limits.
  So what is the expectation then, if not to speed?
Reading the article, there is obviously there's some shady-ass conflict-of-interest shit going down in this specific case.
However.
Literally any municipality in America could make bank if they enforced the traffic laws to the letter. Conditions permitting, most drivers regularly go 5-10mph over the speed limit. Distracted driving is common, and evolving (apparently the new things is people watching streaming videos while driving). In certain areas drivers leave their cars parked on sidewalks, blocking crosswalks, inside bike lanes, etc. Laws about stopping for pedestrians waiting to cross the street may as well not exist. Buzzed (and more recently, mildly-stoned) driving is socially acceptable. My local municipality could probably fund itself exclusively off tickets from drivers who don't have their lights on in the rain.
To be very clear: enforcement is a terrible way to get people to follow traffic laws (an outsized number of encounters that end in police violence started with a traffic stop, traffic stops are disproportionately made against people of color, tickets are regressively priced, etc etc). However the case study of this little town reveals a big truth: lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme that nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
- Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing -- most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).
  In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.
  When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It's proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.
  But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to "level of service". They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.
  And that's not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.
- What kind of a broken system is that?
  Just to be clear, you mean that people ignoring the laws is what makes it broken, right? Not the laws themselves?
  Cause your last sentence threw me off for a second.
  If so, I totally agree with you.
  I'm not from the US, but are people really streaming while driving? Cause that's just ridiculously stupid.
  I know people are driving much longer distances in the US than here, but at least put on some podcast or music to entertain you. Nothing that keeps your eyes off the road.
  
  But speeding tickets are the most common type of infraction, and I think that's probably a good example of a systematic issue.
  There are areas in this country where the speed limit is set artificially low, just to always allow for police to issue tickets capriciously.
  The Atlanta beltway for example would literally grind the city to a halt if everyone adhered to the speed limit signs, and it's actively dangerous to attempt to do so as an individual.
  That's not a people issue, it's a systems issue.
- Nearly all drivers on the road will break the law (however minutely) every time they get behind the wheel. What kind of a broken system is that?
  All of this is intentional. Think about the phrase "I have nothing to hide" when you see flagrant privacy violations. Yes.. Yes you do
- Honestly, just put up cameras at points where following the law is the most critical for road safety, place notices something like a mile before it on the road, and if anyone's still breaking the law after seeing the warning, just send the ticket to the home address the car is registered to with a picture that captures the driver.
  Voilà, road safety AND reduction of unnecessary cop civilian conflicts.
  Still send out patrol vehicles but for like, actual dangerous situations that need an immediate responder, because the patrol effect is a real and observed phenomenon (literally even just having a dude in uniform sitting on a horse in the area reduces crime), something that would actually be improved on by having cops spending less time babysitting highways and more time being visible in high crime areas to deter petty criminal behaviour.
  
  This is how it's done in Korea, cameras everywhere and signs telling you where they are. The built-in gps systems in newer cars also have all the camera locations within their maps. It'll warn you by dinging if you're speeding ahead of a camera and give you a happy ding-ding if you pass the camera while driving under the limit. Seems to work fairly well, although it's kind of annoying on their highways as everyone seemingly races to the next camera where they then rapidly slow down, then speed up, again and again and again.
  Oh and cops don't pull people over. I never saw it and drove many miles over several different visits.
- lawbreaking while driving is widespread on American streets to a level so extreme…
  Is this not the case everywhere? If anything, speeding, distracted driving, and running stop signs / ignoring traffic signals is much more common in other parts of the world.
My cat's name is Fenton!
- He does look like he would take peoples money
  
  Gotta pay for that tux rental somehow
- Oh Jesus Christ!
Hey, it’s the plot line to “nothing to lose”. Is there a coal fire under the courthouse?
- *Nothing But Trouble
  
  🎶"All around the world, it's the same song"🎵 🎶
  
  Thank you, I should google my references before posting them.
There was once a town that the state took its town charter away for the shitty way they pulled people over.
Louisiana needs to do the same.
- Exactly.
People should literally stay away from this town, and drive around it. It's simply unacceptable for any municipality to work or either exist this way. It's better for everyone besides the 221 people living there not to ever visit or even passthrough the place
- Another commentor said that it's very difficult to drive around this town and it'll add a lot of time to your commute. For people who have tight schedules (e.g. pick up or drop off children) it might not be possible to add an hour or more to their drive time.
deleted by creator
And here I thought that city that the Spiffing Brit did in Cities Skylines (and, to a lesser extent, Tropico) that subsisted entirely on toll tickets were just too dumb to be real. If that game allowed you to exist on fines, I suspect it'd be exactly like this place
PS - Invidious link to the vid - https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=gBe39Tn_75c
- He also did a city that paid for itself using the worst possible mass transit system one could possibly imagine. IIRC, by the end of that map it took a person over 24 hours to go from their residential zone, over to their job no matter what it was, and that trip would cost them over $100 each way.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx0EJCOUyQ
  Correction: a trip was over $9000!!!!! In fact it was over $9,000,000 apparently.
  Second correction: the trip was extended to three days of time, but due to how time works in Cities Skylines 2, that's 3 months of transit time on top of the 24 hours he already had set up.
Reminds me of Waldo Florida, back in the day.
- Can you elaborate?
  
  For about 20 years AAA designated Waldo as a speed trap because profit from tickets was a motivation for that city. They issued tickets based on quotas, so cops had to pull over an enough drivers to meet their quota. They also had something like a half dozen speed limits or something crazy like that set up to trick drivers.
The mayor/judge:
Hey aren't there a bunch of 2A, anti-government tyranny people in that area? Wouldn't that be 220 people vs 1?
- That 1 will be you, the traveler who got the ticket, not the mayor. They understand they need that money to exist and they aren't the ones getting tickets. Lots of bridge troll towns scattered around the nation.
So they give out traffic tickets I'd never have to pay if I never visit there again?
- From the article:
  For those who miss court and don’t pay, the consequences can be severe. Fenton sent the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles about 750 requests to suspend driver’s licenses
  
  This is where its so stupid.
  Fuck Louisiana. They can issue a bullshit fine and watch it move up through the legal system and waste many more people's time.
- I dont know how people still think that's how things work.
  You don't pay a ticket in one state, they issue a warrant, then you get arrested in whatever state you live in AND get hauled to the issuing state in the back of a police car.
  
  While I'm not saying it's a good idea to avoid fines, most cities aren't going to go more than 30 minutes or so to pick up a warrant for fines only. Heck, I've seen warrants that have a little addendum, "in-state pick-up only," when the crime was a highly charged felony.
  
  Over one ticket? That's insane. Where I live if I get a ticket and don't pay they will simply take it out of my bank account.
  
  I'll just never visit the US again.
- No, they'll use the interstate agreements to get your license suspended.
This creates a situation where people can be corrupt. Like of the type "the fine is 200$, but if you pay me 50, I'll make sure the ticket will go away". But the article didn't actually show us anything like that happening.
It's more concerned about people who break the law having to pay a fine. I don't care who is holding court over a traffic violation of driving 50% over the speed limit. 75 in a 50? Having your license revoked is the reasonable consequence here.

115 comments