LYNNWOOD — The Lynnwood City Council is likely to postpone until next year a decision on the future of traffic-enforcement cameras.
At a public meeting Thursday, city staff recommended the council wait to see how Seattle renegotiates its contract with the same camera vendor, Arizona-based American Traffic Solutions. The city’s proposed budget for 2017-18 assumes it will continue to collect revenue from enforcement cameras, documents show.
A vote on the proposed extension was tentatively scheduled for October. If approved, the contract would be renewed through mid-January.
Lynnwood’s contract for red-light cameras ends in November. The city’s school-zone speed cameras are under a separate contract that is up for renewal in June 2018.
The recommendation for a temporary extension for the red-light camera contract was made Thursday to the council’s finance committee.
Absent from the discussion was collision data, a subject that has been a sticking point in the policy discussions.
Lynnwood officials have claimed for nearly a decade that the cameras improve traffic safety. They also acknowledge that those claims are based on anecdotal evidence.
Lynnwood started using the devices in 2007. By the end of 2015, the city had collected $19.2 million in camera revenue, a total that includes the $5.8 million paid to the vendor. Camera tickets account for about 5 percent of the city’s annual general fund revenues. There’s no easy way to measure where the money has gone, the city has said.
On Thursday, city staff shared a memo with councilmembers that outlined four options for the future. Three of those involved new contracts. The fourth option — unplugging the cameras — would mean “the costs and revenue associated with the contract would end,” the memo said.
The meeting started with Assistant City Administrator Art Ceniza providing everyone present with printed copies of an Associated Press article from July. The article reported that a national study, funded by auto insurance companies, found that removing enforcement cameras can lead to an uptick in serious crashes.
Ceniza recommended the councilmembers rely on the national data from the study, rather than any numbers specific to Lynnwood.
“The article confirms our intuitive feeling for how we think things are working,” Ceniza said. He added that Mayor Nicola Smith was comfortable with the proposed extension.
Reliable crash data is available for only four Lynnwood intersections with red-light cameras. Those intersections all fall along either 196th Street SW or 44th Avenue W.
That subset is too small to draw significant conclusions about whether the cameras are having a safety impact, public works director Bill Franz said. However, he believes the numbers show what he described as “modest” improvements.
Franz cautioned that Lynnwood has so few years of data available that a snowstorm with a couple of related wrecks could skew any analysis. He also noted that it’s difficult to account for increases in traffic over the years.
“You have to be very suspect of our data,” he said.
Meanwhile, the police department still is working on its own report about enforcement cameras and crash data, Franz said. The last report of its kind, in 2011, was inconclusive.
Councilman Ian Cotton, an engineer who calls himself “data-centric,” had asked for the local crash numbers in June.
Two weeks ago, Cotton also sent city staff and councilmembers an email, reminding them of his request. He still wants to “understand how traffic incidents and safety have changed since the traffic photo red cameras,” he wrote.
On Thursday, Cotton said the council should “do at least a gut check” on the data available before voting on a new contract.
Lynnwood’s camera contract is based on a similar agreement between the Arizona vendor and the city of Seattle.
Rikki King: 425-339-3449; rking@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @rikkiking.
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