People who speed through Carencro's school zones will soon get a ticket for their trouble.
The City of Carencro is trying to make their school zones safer for children by installing speed cameras around all schools in the city, Police Chief David Anderson says.
The cameras are only installed in school zones, and will only operation during the school zone times, Anderson said. The fines are "significantly" less than the usual speeding-in-a-school-zone fines and will be handled as a civil process, he said.
Carencro is using Blue Line Solutions, a photo-enforcement company out of Tennessee that focuses their business on school zone enforcement. In exchange for installing the system the company gets a cut of the fines, but it will be a Carencro employee who processes and checks the captures, the violation doesn't go on your record and appeals will be handled in Carencro City Court, the chief says.
"Our number one complaint in Carencro is speeding in neighborhoods and school zones," Anderson says. "But we just don't have the manpower to have someone sitting in every school zone every morning and every afternoon. This helps us out."
This is not something that happened overnight, Anderson said.
"An ordinance passed earlier this year, after we did a lot of research on this," Anderson said. "This is not a money-making thing for the City of Carencro. This is to help our schools out, and to keep our kids safe. A lot of kids in Carencro still walk to school."
Once the cameras are turned on, there will be a 30-day grace period, Anderson said.
"Once they're up and running, we'll send out warnings for the next month," he said.
Anderson said that, although the studies he had done showed a really high number of speeders in Carencro's school zones, he expects to have pretty fast compliance.
"I don't think we're going to have a whole lot," he said. "And my biggest goal is to have no violations. That's my number one goal, to have no tickets issued in these school zones."
Anderson said he'd much rather see motorists voluntarily comply with school zones in the city.
