Alachua County and City of Gainesville take next step in implementing school zone speed cameras

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Both Alachua County and the City of Gainesville took the next step this week toward implementing school zone speed cameras.

Alachua County

At their October 1 meeting, the Alachua County Commission decided to pursue a phased approach, starting with two to four school zones in 2025; the schools will be selected based on safety, traffic, and demographic data, including an equity overlay. County staff said that a slow roll-out would allow the County to assess staffing and budgetary needs before scaling up.

Seventeen school zones in the unincorporated county were listed as “under heightened risk,” including zones at Archer Elementary, Ft. Clarke Middle, Hidden Oak Elementary, Hawthorne Middle/High, Shell Elementary, Idylwild Elementary, Kanapaha Middle, Wiles Elementary, Lake Forest Elementary, Chiles Elementary, Meadowbrook Elementary, and all three Newberry schools. All of these schools would be listed in the ordinance to provide flexibility in adding schools as the program expands. 

Alachua County Sheriff’s Office would take the lead on procuring equipment and would execute an agreement with a vendor, while the County would approve the ordinance. 

The proposed ordinance allows enforcement either during arrival and dismissal times or during the entire school day, from 30 minutes before arrival to 30 minutes after dismissal. 

Drivers who exceed the school zone speed limit by 11 miles an hour or more will be fined $100. By statute, the $100 fines are allocated as follows:

• $23 to the state Department of Revenue
• $12 to the school board
• $60 to the County to cover vendor fees, administration of the program including reviews and appeals, and public safety initiatives
• $5 to the School Crossing Guard Recruitment and Retention program 

Staff said that the program has been revenue-neutral or slightly revenue-positive in other communities, but it’s fairly new, and not many communities have adopted the program yet. Locally, High Springs recently started using school zone traffic cameras.

Commissioners said they preferred that the program be revenue-neutral, and they wanted the Sheriff to take the lead on administering the program.

Sheriff Emery Gainey said, “Because we’re going to be an enforcement agency, we need someone else to be the magistrate side… We suggest code enforcement.” He said that hearings on appeals will also require work from the Clerk’s office, but no money is currently planned for that office.

A County staff member said they’ve been talking about hiring a magistrate within the Codes department, and that person could also function as the magistrate for school zone appeals.

Commissioner Anna Prizzia said it sounded like the effort could actually cost money, and Gainey responded, “Unequivocally, and quite frankly, that’s why we want to roll slow.”

Prizzia asked whether it would cost less than “just stepping up enforcement of our school zones,” and Gainey said he would be coming back to the Commission at some point to talk about his traffic unit, which is down to only four deputies, and “that program will surely cost you more,” but he would need to expand the traffic unit, anyway, because “we’ve got speeding problems all over this county that we must address.”

Alford: “I personally feel like this is the Sheriff’s job”

Chair Mary Alford said, “I personally feel like this is the Sheriff’s job… I understood our only role here was to implement the ordinance to allow the Sheriff to utilize this program that was passed by the legislature… I’m actually surprised that we want to roll it out slow because the vendors… would present us with a roll-out plan… So why wouldn’t we go that way?”

Alachua County Sheriff’s Lt. Billy Beck said the vendor provides a speed study, and the local agency reviews that, along with verifying the hours for the school zones. The vendor sends out the violation to the registered owner of the vehicle, and then the owner has 30 days to appeal to the magistrate. If the owner does not appeal it or pay it, it becomes a Uniform Traffic Citation that is filed by the Clerk of the Court. If the owner appeals, the magistrate gets a packet from the vendor with a picture of the violation and the time of the violation.

Beck said there is still “legwork” to do at the local level; local staff will need to double-check that each reported violation is actually a violation and is not a stolen tag or stolen vehicle.

Alford said, “This seems so much cheaper than having a deputy, and it is your job to enforce the speed limit, so we’re trying to make it easier. So I’m sorry, I just don’t see this being, like, such a heavy lift.”

Gainey said they don’t see it as an “extremely heavy lift,” but “there are some mandatory things that must be done.” He said another example would be an emergency vehicle speeding through a school zone: “The camera’s not going to know [it’s an emergency]. It’s going to issue a citation. The officer’s got to look at it… There is a requirement that someone’s got to verify, and that’s law enforcement.” 

Beck said he had spoken with High Springs Police Chief Antoine Sheppard, and “he is actually taking on the responsibility of it because he doesn’t have anybody to do it, and he spends about four hours of his day checking just that one school zone.” The City of Eustis, an early adopted of the program, reported spending about 30 seconds per violation or about seven hours a month for one school zone.

Gainey said he would prefer to monitor the school zones only during drop-off and pick-up times, at least to start with. He suggested writing the ordinance to allow for monitoring all day but to give him discretion to decide how to implement it.

Cornell’s motion to adopt staff’s recommendation to proceed with advertising the ordinance and direct staff to draft an Interlocal Agreement between the County and the Sheriff’s Office regarding program responsibilities and revenue-sharing was approved unanimously.

City of Gainesville

At their October 3 meeting, the Gainesville City Commission heard a presentation from Captain Summer Kerkau, who said the City would follow a similar process by performing a speed study, determining the school zones where cameras would be placed, and enacting an ordinance to implement the school zone cameras. She pointed out that the $100 violation is a civil penalty, but if the vehicle owner does not pay or appeal the fine, it is converted to a Uniform Traffic Citation, which comes with points on the license. Later in the meeting, she said that if you get a citation from an officer for 13 or 14 miles over the speed limit in a school zone, the fine would be $459 with four points to the driver’s license. She said the vendors have agreed to waive a violation if the driver is stopped by an officer for the same incident.

Kerkau said a 2023 school zone speed study in the city showed that Gainesville High School, Lincoln Middle School, Stephen Foster Elementary School, and Talbot Elementary School have the most violators driving more than 10 miles over the speed limit. Along with High Springs’ implementation of the program and the above County discussion, Kerkau said the City of Alachua Commission has approved moving forward with the program. She said High Springs monitors the cameras all day, and “they have found that the majority of the violations occurred during the school day when the lights are not in effect” (those violations are for speeds more than 10 mph over the normal speed on those roads, not the school zone speed).

Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker asked whether the cameras would be tied into the traffic camera system used by law enforcement, and GPD Chief Nelson Moya said that system is used “post-incident – so we don’t have anybody at our intelligence center sitting there monitoring Flock cameras… We review that footage post-incident or while the incident is being reported, so we can have better intelligence, so we can deploy our resources – so the capacity is there.”

In response to a question from Commissioner Casey Willits, Moya said the cameras could also be programmed to notify law enforcement in cases like Amber Alerts where law enforcement agencies are looking for a specific tag number. 

Commissioner Ed Book said, “This is not a funding source for us. This is about public safety and traffic safety, and all we’re doing is leveraging traffic safety via technology.”

Mayor Harvey Ward agreed, “I know there’s nothing we can do about the statute – it is what it is – but it is important to reiterate what Commissioner Book said: This is not a revenue generator for us; we will barely break even on it.” He said that 10 mph over a 15-mph school zone speed limit is a “very high percentage grace period… We are not being strict about this at all. You’re flagrantly violating the law if you get a ticket for this… I believe this will save lives and will save some of our most vulnerable lives in our community.”

Duncan-Walker made a motion to receive the presentation on automated school zone speed enforcement, and Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut seconded the motion. At the request of City Manager Cynthia Curry, Duncan-Walker added direction to the City Attorney’s office to prepare a draft ordinance and direction to GPD to move forward with their procedural items. 

Willits said, “It feels a little fast,” and Ward replied, “We are months away from anything actually happening… It’s going to take a long time before anything official happens.”

The motion passed unanimously.