TimesArgus.com - We Are Vermont

Driving the gauntlet

Town along Route 4 collects $232,715 in speeding fines

Chief Deputy Thomas Herb of the Windsor County Sheriff's Department uses a hand-held radar gun to clock traffic on Route 4 in Bridgewater on Friday. Herb said the advantage of the hand-held radar is he can show the clocked speed to a motorist. PHOTO BY VYTO STARINSKAS

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BRIDGEWATER —Running north and south, the Green Mountains limit a motorist's options to travel between the eastern and western parts of the state. The options that remain offer mountaintop vistas and winding riverside drives.

But a combination of location and law enforcement has also provided one small town along Route 4 an opportunity to make $1,000 a week last year in traffic fines.

For many years, Bridgewater has contracted with the Windsor County Sheriff's Department to provide speed enforcement in town. During the past fiscal year ending June 30, the town paid $179,100 to the Sheriff's Department and received $232,715 in revenue from speeding fines, a net profit of $53,615.

Bridgewater is one of six towns in Windsor County — along with Barnard, Cavendish, Plymouth, Pomfret and Redding — to contract with the Sheriff's Department for speed enforcement. Each town pays a flat rate of $41 an hour, and for the past two years, Bridgewater contracted for 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

"They tell us where to go, and we go there," said Sheriff Michael Chamberlain, who oversees the five full-time deputies who provide speed enforcement for the towns that contract with his department. "We could go in and patrol and might not ever write a ticket, and the town would still have to pay for our services."

Of the other towns that contract with the Sheriff's Department, however, none make a profit like Bridgewater. Barnard, which contracts for eight hours a week, paid $16,764 for the fiscal year ending June 2008 — the most recent numbers available — and received $17,141 in revenue, a profit of $377. Plymouth saw a profit of $352 for the most recent fiscal year ending June 30, paying $69,431 and receiving $69,783.

Three other towns — Reading, Pomfret and Cavendish — lost money in their traffic enforcement efforts, losing $9,688, $10,029 and $17,431 respectively.

"It's not a money-making proposition and it's not intended to be a money-making proposition," said Richard Svec, town manager for Cavendish, where police focus their speed enforcement on Route 131 through the villages of Cavendish and Proctorsville, along 20 Mile Stream Road and Depot Street.

While it might cost the town money, Svec said, it is still a wise investment.

"Cavendish used to have its own police force more than 30 years ago but it was cost-prohibitive," he said. "This is a good way to provide an affordable police presence."

Bridgewater Selectwoman Mary Oldenburg also said traffic enforcement is not about the money.

"The money is not the issue. The issue is safety," she said. "We're not trying to make this a money-making thing, but it has turned out that way the last few years."

During the last five years, the town has made $147,703 in profit from speeding fines from 12,515 tickets. While a handful was written by Vermont State Police or Division of Motor Vehicles Enforcement, nearly all were written by the Windsor County Sheriff's Department.

Sheriff Chamberlain is quick to point out that his department never sees the money from the fines, which are sent to the Traffic Bureau in White River Junction. The state then returns the money directly to the towns using different formulas depending upon the type of ticket issued. In some cases, nearly all the money returns to the town. Other times, the money is pooled and divided among the towns based upon a ratio of the money a town spends on law enforcement versus what it pays in property taxes.

While it doesn't receive the revenue from the tickets, the Windsor County Sheriff's Department did receive nearly $179,100 from Bridgewater last year. However, Sheriff Chamberlain denied any implication that the town pressures his department to turn a profit.

"They've never said to me, 'Sheriff, if you don't make us money, you're gone,'" he said.

So how does Bridgewater generate so many tickets and so much revenue? Even accounting for the high number of hours they contract for — more in a day than Barnard, Pomfret or Redding do in a week — Bridgewater consistently sees profit margins of between 10 percent and 30 percent.

"There's just a lot more volume, and with that volume you're going to have a lot more speeding," Chamberlain said of the Route 4 corridor, arguably the most expedient way to cross the state. While it is a four-lane divided highway as it passes through western towns, such as Castleton and Fair Haven, on the east side of Rutland it becomes a regular two-lane highway, crossing over Sherburne Pass in Killington.

Drivers typically has a good head of steam by the time they reach the bottom of the pass, and the straight, flat road gives them little reason to brake. As Route 4 enters Bridgewater from the west, it has wide shoulders for cyclists and pedestrians, but those shoulders narrow as the speed limit decreases to 40 mph. The speed limit is clearly posted, except for those drivers coming from Plymouth on Route 100A, whose speed limit sign is hidden for most of the year behind the leaves of a tree.

Within a mile, the speed limit drops to 35 mph and then to 25 mph in front of the Bridgewater Village School. The wide shoulder several miles to the west has disappeared and the highway, now looking like any number of village Main Streets in the state, is lined with businesses and houses, some less than 20 feet from the edge of the road. With no sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists either travel in the road or along the thin dirt strip on either side.

The speed limits themselves on Route 4 are not set by the town, but by the state. John Zicconi, a spokesman for the Agency of Transportation, said traffic engineers set speed limits based upon their surveys of the speeds drivers travel, the area surrounding the road and accident history.

Speed appears to have contributed to many crashes on Route 4 in Bridgewater. According to the Agency of Transportation, there were 75 crashes between 2000 and 2008, resulting in 39 injuries and no fatalities. Of those crashes, 27 were due to either exceeding the speed limit or driving too fast for conditions.

So while the Sheriff's Department sees no profit from the tickets it writes and the town hasn't created the situation that forces drivers to cut their speed in half, it does appear the town is using the situation to its advantage. Oldenburg said Bridgewater uses the ticket revenue for road projects within the town, including a recently completed project on Bridgewater Center Road and another on Gold Coast Road.

"It lets us do these projects without taxing these people out of their homes," Oldenburg said.

And how do the locals feel about a police presence that has written on average nearly seven tickets a day for the last five years?

"Some people are happy. Other people think they're overzealous. But people should know they're here," Oldenburg said.



In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that this reporter received a speeding ticket earlier this year in Bridgewater.

josh.ogorman@rutlandherald.com