A modest revision to an originally large plan.
Metro Police Department will spend almost $50 million of its budget to partially fund the city’s traffic enforcement and street light operations in 2025, but that extra funding won’t have much impact on the transportation agency.
In the first major move since Ban Tien left the Houston Police Department for the transportation police, the city will pull $25.4 million from Metro to fund the police department’s traffic enforcement division and another $21.8 million for traffic and street lights, according to Meredith Johnson, a spokeswoman for Metro.
“This is around $50 million in additional revenue that won’t have to come from the general fund,” said Melissa Dubowski, the city of Houston’s finance director, of the additional funding from Metro. “There’s more to come, but this is definitely a big first step in the things we’ve been working on.”
The combined costs will take around 3.5% of Metro’s total revenues, according to budget documents. The funds are coming from a source of revenue inside Metro that the city hadn’t previously used.
Johnson said Metro dedicates around 25% of sales tax revenues – which amount to around $217 million – to fund interlocal agreements with partner entities. The funds can be used for street improvements, mobility projects and other services.
Dubowski said the intention is for this plan for funding traffic enforcement to become a recurring source for the city.
See here for some background. This was scaled down quite a bit from the original idea of folding Metro’s police department into HPD, which in retrospect is not that surprising. I had to read this story a couple of times to be clear on what is being proposed, and having done that I don’t see anything obviously weird. This is a reasonable use of the funding source in question, it’s not taking anything away from the non-Houston parts of Metro, and while this kind of off-book accounting is an invitation to future shenanigans, it’s also how we roll in this state.
I guess the main question I have at this point is whether this is intended as a way to let HPD shift some funds to other departments and thus beef them up, or is it intended to make traffic enforcement bigger and more impactful? Mayor Whitmire’s non-linear view of Vision Zero suggests the latter, but as it’s not clear in the story I’ll wait and see. If six months from now everyone is complaining about the number of speed traps out there, I guess we’ll know.
(With the Kubosh Brothers off the radar) Instead of giving it to HPD, maybe spend the $50 mil on red light cameras and call it a day. The Citizens of HTX would thank you. After about six months and $70M in fines assessed to dangerous drivers…clear the balance sheet and rejoice in your new source of income.
red light cameras have been unconstitutional for over a decade now. what you (CL) propose is technically illegal.