Maryland lawmakers may not have technically raised taxes in the most recent legislative session. But by passing legislation earlier this year to allow speed cameras throughout the state, they made the Free State more of the Fee State.
The legislation, which takes effect Oct. 1, also made Maryland a little less civilized. Adding speed cameras is like putting a video camera in the powder room to make sure guests wash their hands or banning overweight people from eating at fast-food restaurants. What if a body mass index machine blocked entrance to restaurants and scoring 25 or less was required to order a Big Mac? Would that be technology on the people’s side?
In the same way speed cameras pole vault over the line of propriety. Their existence says government doesn’t trust residents; their fines show that government will exploit residents to maximize revenue; and their application shows that those in power will be exempt from their rules, as a recent court case in Montgomery County throwing out tickets issued to on-duty police officers for speeding without reason indicates. Government sees it differently. The Examiner recently reported that D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier described as a “cowardly tactic” drivers who use technology to pinpoint speed cameras. She said that the practice undermines police efforts to improve public safety.
Her argument does not stand because the software does not promote breaking the law. On the contrary, it helps drivers better obey it by alerting them to slow down. If public safety is the top priority for law enforcement, more people driving more slowly should be considered an achievement.
But since, as Circuit Court Judge Ronald Rubin, the man who threw out the tickets for the four police officers, said: “That’s what this statute is: This is a revenue raiser,” the real issue is money.
Montgomery County, the only jurisdiction in Maryland before the state legislation to allow cameras, expects to raise $29 million this year through its network of 60 cameras. Baltimore City, which recently introduced legislation to allow them within its boundaries, as required by the state law, expects $7.1 million from the tickets in fiscal 2010.
The law would be a particular affront in the city, since driving in Baltimore is like navigating the surface of the moon. And in April downtown was shut down for almost a week while crews repaired a massive water main break.
If residents cannot fine the city for poor maintenance that led to quantifiable harm to businesses and snarled traffic, the city deserves no new power to tax its residents and visitors. Most importantly, the law presumes guilt and forces residents to pay up or lose a day fighting the ticket. By default, it upends the long-held and respected belief in innocence until proven guilt for those charged to increase revenue by a paltry amount.
And it aligns state and local governments with Wall Street financiers who manipulated the rules to maximize profit, begging the question of what scheme will next emerge from government to assault taxpayers.
The pathetic thing is that governments will add cameras and not meet their revenue targets, since they presume people’s behavior won’t change significantly following their installation. But just as high cigarette taxes spurred a massive new black market in contraband smokes, legislators should expect more and more people to find ways to avoid the cameras.
In some small, comical and ironic way, flashing one’s lights at oncoming cars to warn others of speed traps or making software available to help drivers avoid cameras answers John F. Kennedy’s call to “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Speeding is wrong. But when government oversteps its bounds, citizens need to remind it.
Government officials may call that conduct cowardly. But what can they expect when they treat the law as a weapon and citizens as automated teller machines?
Examiner Columnist Marta Mossburg is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and lives in Baltimore.
