Heath, Ohio suffers full onslaught of government enforcement cyborgs.
Heath is close-knit community of 8,527 people, 3,403 households, and 2,375 families. Its total land area is 10.4 square miles, making it the same size as Bright, Indiana if you include Hidden Valley Lake.
The mayor wanted photo enforcement to reduce accidents. Last July they had 35. This July that dropped to 30. But during that same month, 10 traffic robots monitoring 6 intersections, wrote a whopping 14,865 tickets! That's right folks, more than four tickets per household in the first month of operations. If all those tickets are paid, it will represent 12% of the entire budget for the whole county. Government officials still insist they never dreamed of using them for revenue enhancement. Yeah right.
Outraged residents turned to WeDemandAVote.com and COAST for help. Our General Counsel drafted a charter amendment that bans the use of speed trap spy cams forever. Activists in Heath demanded a vote, and turned in more than twice the required signatures to gain ballot access. This November the citizens of Heath, OH will decide whether to continue living under the omnipotent "protection" of Big Brother.
Recall that last year Cincinnati became the first city in the country to ban red light and speed enforcement cameras after COAST, NAACP and their coalition partners successfully amended our city charter. Just think, those could just as easily have been our traffic tickets. Whew!
2008-08-11 UPDATE: Revised breakdown is 12,555 speed violations, and 303 red light violations, about 8600 of which were issued by two speed-only cameras.
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