Speed cams set to go dark as pols fiddle
ALBANY – Kids beware! The city’s speed camera program around schools is set to go dark Wednesday thanks to inaction by the state Senate.
“Right now, all over the city we have speed cameras, literally this minute, protecting kids,” de Blasio said Tuesday at an event that featured a countdown clock at Public School 78 on Staten Island. “But we also know that because of inaction in Albany, that, literally, the hours and the minutes are ticking away, to the point where we’re not going to have these speed cameras.”
Gov. Cuomo ripped Senate Republicans for failing to act.
“Our first obligation as elected officials is to ensure public safety, and there’s indisputable evidence showing speed cameras save children’s lives,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “The Senate Republicans’ refusal to return to Albany and pass this legislation is a complete dereliction of that duty.”
Bills that would keep the speed camera program up and running passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly, but died in the Senate, where the GOP held them up on behalf of Sen. Simcha Felder.
Felder, a Brooklyn Dem who caucuses with the GOP and has given them the needed 32nd vote for the majority, wants to tie the issue to his push for armed security at city schools.
Sen. Martin Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who has been nailed by the cams and has been taking heat for the program’s pending demise, is set to hold a press conference Wednesday urging Gov. Cuomo to call the Legislature back into special session to address the issue.
But Cuomo on Tuesday ripped Golden for “playing politics with the lives of children,” noting that the Senate GOP leadership simply has to call the chamber back to pass one of the Assembly bills.
The silence from the state Senate is deafening — almost like the eerie quiet in the moments after a hurtling car crashes with a sickening crunch into other vehicles, or a lamppost, or people.
Today is the dark day that a proven life-saving technology all but vanishes from New York City’s streets, all because the leader of the Republican Senate, John Flanagan, lacks the decency to bring back members for a vote.
A majority of senators, 33 out of 62, supports not only renewing the law that grudgingly allows speed cameras to operate during school hours in a scant 140 locations around New York City, but doubling the number of cameras and widening their permitted range.
School hours include summer session, where cameras are on the job at more than 80 spots.
But Flanagan let the clock run out last month, before adjourning for the year with life-and-death business undone. And forget about taking on Mayor de Blasio’s necessary idea of intensifying consequences up to license-plate revocations for chronic offenders like Dorothy Bruns, who in March barreled over two tots in Brooklyn even after her docs demanded she cease driving.
The cams and their $50 fines, which only kick in at 36 miles per hour, have been proven to not only diminish traffic fatalities but the likelihood that a driver will again recklessly speed.
With chutzpah that’s shameless even by Albany standards, a spokeswoman for the Senate suggests that advocates exploit the stories of children slain by vehicles on city streets. Good grief: Their parents and surviving siblings are at the barricades pleading to keep the cameras going.
Flanagan plugs his ears, pretending not to hear the cries. From today until he calls the Senate back in session, so much as a scratch on a kid in a school zone will be his to answer for.