Monday Night, the RTM Votes on the Speed Cameras. Here's What's Actually on the Table.

This Monday, August 24, at 8 p.m. at the Board of Education, Fairfield's RTM takes public comment and votes on two items about the school-zone speed camera program. Whatever your view of the cameras, you should know what the items do, because it's less than you might think.

Item 5 asks the RTM to "confirm" the camera plan the state approved last December. At the informational meeting on August 17, members asked what happens if the RTM votes no, or tables it. The answer, on the record: it "doesn't actually change the operational plan." So Item 5 changes nothing either way. Residents should understand that before anyone describes its passage as an endorsement.

Item 6 is the one with substance. Six RTM members have proposed an ordinance drafting committee to review the camera ordinance in light of a year of data and public feedback. That committee could fix real, documented things. The town's own August packet shows 25,430 tickets billed at $1,271,500, with the vendor collecting $15 of every paid ticket even though the town's ordinance says vendor fees can't depend on ticket volume. It shows citations went out with wrong fine amounts during rollout, an error the CFO valued at roughly $104,200. It shows 948 appeals pending against a hearing capacity that had heard 13 cases as of late July, and of those 13, 8 won. And at the August 17 meeting, officials confirmed license plate data is retained for a year, while the ordinance residents were given promises destruction within 30 days.

Here's a detail worth sitting with. The packet's appeals data runs through July 22. The vendor's event counts run through July 31. But the citation and revenue accounting stops June 30, before the program's first month of full enforcement. The contract gives the town real-time access to the vendor's citation system, so July's numbers exist. The RTM is being asked to confirm a program without seeing a single month of full-enforcement ticket data. If that data flattered the program, it's hard to believe we wouldn't have seen it.

There's also a records problem. On July 6, I filed a public records request for the town's new Axon contract, which the FY27 police budget lists at $3,383,964 and which includes a real-time crime center, license plate reader integration, and drone technology, along with the records of the town's decision to end its Flock contracts. Forty-four days later, the town has produced nothing. Connecticut law requires prompt compliance. If the town's technology decisions are as sound as officials say, the records will show it, and I hope the town releases them.

One more thing, since it keeps being suggested that residents are confusing speed cameras with license plate readers. Nobody's confused. The two topics are connected because the town's own contracts connected them. The speed camera agreement with Altumint includes, in Schedule A, one free Flock license plate reader and one Flock Condor camera per speed camera, with installation to begin "immediately upon the VioCam system issuing warnings or citations." And the FY27 police budget bundles license plate readers into a $3.4 million Axon package with a real-time crime center. Residents didn't blur the line between ticketing cameras and surveillance cameras. The paperwork did. Pointing that out isn't confusion. It's reading.

I've put every source, every meeting video, and a two-page vendor-governance framework for the drafting committee at fairfieldspeedcams.netlify.app. If you can't attend Monday, the site will draft a written comment to your RTM representatives in about two minutes. If you can attend, public comment starts at 8. Two minutes at a microphone is worth more than everything I've written.

Full disclosure: I'm a Fairfield resident, District 9, and a filed candidate for State Representative in the 132nd District. Discount my opinions for that if you like. But every claim above comes from the town's own records, and the records say the same thing no matter whose politics you check them against.