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Red Lights Roll to a Stop
As the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners reviewed preliminary budget impacts earlier this month, staff noted they’ll be short $1.4 million from Wilmington’s red-light program, money that has traditionally gone to public education.
It’s a roundabout way to hear the contentious program is being shuttered, but it seems the county’s intel was accurate. While Wilmington City Manager Tony Caudle isn’t expected to release his proposed budget for another month, a city spokesperson confirmed the red-light program will not be in it.
So, unless city council members directly intervene, the contract with Verra Mobility—which runs the third-party program and takes a cut of the profits—will expire.
The program, which allows a third party to issue civil summons to drivers who run red lights, is designed to curb collisions at high-risk intersections while sending most profits to public schools. So, on paper, it’s a good deal. But in practice, red-light cameras around the state and here in Wilmington have been challenged for years by an eclectic group of lawyers, engineers, state regulators, frustrated ticket recipients, and the occasional journalist (including me, for over seven years).
More recently, Wilmington’s program has drawn bipartisan skepticism from councilmembers like Republican Luke Waddell and Democrat David Joyner, namely because the city loses money on it—over $200,000 in 2022—and has had only a middling effect on collisions.
Red-light cameras have a troubled history that long predates Wilmington’s program. Over a century ago, the Massachusetts Supreme Court heard a challenge to a speed camera (a progenitor of the red light camera), and over the years enforcement cameras have been challenged on constitutional, regulatory, and engineering grounds—not to mention the long history of bribery and other corruption associated with the companies that run the programs and the elected officials who approve them.
The camera programs are banned in almost two dozen states. North Carolina is one of a few states that explicitly allow them, authorizing the first ones in 2001. Over the years the list grew, only to be whittled down by a series of challenges. In 2022, Greenville shuttered its program after the state Court of Appeals found it unconstitutional, and Fayetteville preemptively let its contract expire while facing a similar legal challenge.
Last March, Raleigh’s city manager threw in the towel, eyeing potential legislation, a series of successful civil suits, and concerns that the red-light cameras actually increased crashes in some areas.
That left Wilmington’s red-light program as the last in the state, but at the time, the city had no plans to scrap it, having recently cited positive feedback from the police department and city traffic engineers.
Now, it looks like the city is putting red lights in the rearview. A spokesperson on Wednesday said the city determined it could still realize public safety benefits without the citation portion of the program. The city is exploring replacement cameras that will provide similar benefits but at a lower cost than the Verra Mobility contract, which is set to expire at the end of June.
If you manage to get one more summons for the road, bad news: City officials say they’ll still be due, even if the program is put to rest. (Good news: Plenty of legal experts say they’re unenforceable, and you can toss them in the trash. More to the point, the red-light violation notices are civil summons, and failure to pay means Verra Mobility and/or Wilmington would have to take civil action to contest non-payment or lobby the state to garnish an individual's state tax return. Whether that would be worth it on a good day is debatable, more so given that this is the last red-light contract in the state,)
–Benjamin Schachtman
Shi-Boom or Bust
Last week, we covered why North Carolina’s favorite sunshade, Shibumi, hadn’t yet made it to South Carolina’s busiest shorelines in Myrtle Beach. After the city of Myrtle Beach nixed the potential for a one-year trial period for wind-driven sunshades last year, Horry County was set to vote on the same ordinance.
Shibumi saw the Horry County vote as its last chance at gaining a foothold in the Grand Strand. But the county council shot it down Tuesday evening.
Despite other beaches up and down the coast reporting no public safety issues with the shades, Myrtle Beach-area leaders repeatedly cite visibility concerns to explain their objections. Public safety officials in nearby Sunset and Ocean Isle Beaches in North Carolina told The Assembly last week they were fans of Shibumi and had no problems with them.
Notably, Myrtle Beach and Horry County contract with umbrella rental companies that provide free lifeguard services in exchange for the right to exclusively conduct their business on certain segments of the beach. Representatives of those companies lobbied the governments against the Shibumi trial period, and city officials said they haven’t encountered concerns about any conflict of interest.
After the vote, Shibumi co-founder Dane Barnes told WMBF the Council “decided to bury its head in the sand,” he said. “Horry County residents deserve better.”
– Johanna F. Still
