City priorities: Shoreline speed trap counter-productive

  • Tuesday, March 16, 2010 7:46pm

For the last three weeks Shoreline officials have laid a speed trap at or near Third Avenue Northwest and Northwest 175th Street with up to five squad cars at a time.

Both Third and 175th are wide, little-traveled roads with great visibility and no schools or children around to endanger.

Officers have chosen these roads because they know that no one will drive 25 mph on these wide, open roads because this is an arbitrary and unreasonable speed limit.

I know government budgets are tight, but manufacturing bogus reasons to harass taxpayers to earn a buck is shameful.

Here’s what I’m hearing from my Edmonds and Shoreline neighbors lately: the city fundraising policy has nabbed such dangerous criminals as a couple of middle-aged teachers, a few homemakers, a couple of notorious Boeing engineers, a banker, the manager of a large fishing company, a dentist and on and on. All of these people are safe drivers with clean records and 30 years of experience or more behind the wheel — and most of them live in Shoreline.

We’re not impulsive teenagers late for class at Shoreline Community College. We’re the backbone of the community who regularly perform public service for the city, attend its churches and are the people government turns to when it needs help. All of us would have gotten the message with a warning.

If city officials were really concerned about public safety, Shoreline police would spend their time booting the drug dealers out of Shoreview Park and Echo Lake Park and on the Interurban Trail by 167th Street. But, then, crackheads rarely pay their fines so they’re not much of a revenue source, are they?

Or maybe Shoreline police don’t know about those problems because they’re too busy hiding in the bushes pulling stickups with radar guns in the neighborhoods where hardworking, law-abiding citizens live.

I guess they have to find some way to pay for all that new glass and steel they moved into on 175th Street.

Kurt Herzog

Edmonds

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