Judge wants red-light ticket stats
Question part of suit against former mayor
Already the subject of a lawsuit, Crestwood’s red-light cameras are under further scrutiny with a federal judge questioning how many tickets the village has issued over several years were justified.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin sentenced the village’s former mayor, Lou Presta, to a year in prison Monday after Presta had pleaded guilty to taking a $5,000 bribe in exchange for agreeing to ensure red-light camera violations in Crestwood remained at a high level, regardless whether the tickets were valid.
Presta resigned Nov. 16, the day before pleading guilty to taking the bribe in March 2018 from Omar Maani, an executive at the red-light camera company SafeSpeed LLC.
Maani was cooperating with the FBI, and the entire exchange was caught on an undercover camera.
Presta took the money in exchange for helping SafeSpeed get more red-light cameras in the village and boost revenues from existing cameras by approving more violations, according to his plea agreement.
A lawsuit pending in Cook County Circuit Court challenges the validity of tens of thousands of red-light violations, and Durkin said at the sentencing hearing “I wonder how many tickets, but for this conduct, wouldn’t have been written.”
“I don’t know how many of those tickets were unjustified,” the judge said.
Crestwood resident Deborah Reinhart said she was ticketed two years ago for violating the red-light camera posted at the intersection of Cicero Avenue and Cal Sag Road.
“I obviously wasn’t too happy about that, and I don’t think it’s helped with safety at all,” she said.
“I know a lot of towns have gotten rid of cameras.”
Prosecutors said, and evidence showed, that in conversations with SafeSpeed’s Maani, Presta’s aim was to keep the numbers of violations issued by the village at a high level.
The cameras were “touted as a public safety measure but defendant viewed them as a source of revenue,” assistant U.S. Attorney James Durkin, no relation to the judge, said at Presta’s sentencing hearing.
Red-light cameras were first installed in 2016, and the village’s budget for the fiscal year shows revenue from police fines, which later included ticket revenue from the cameras, to be estimated at $780,000.
Revenue from police fines in fiscal 2020 was budgeted at $3.2 million compared with $3.3 million in fiscal year 2019, according to village budgets.
For the village’s fiscal year that ended April 30 of this year, revenue from police fines was estimated to be $2.5 million, or Crestwood’s second-largest source of revenue behind sales taxes, pegged at $6.3 million, and just ahead of property taxes, at $1.67 million, according to the most recent budget.
The pending lawsuit filed in October 2017 in Cook County challenges the validity of tens of thousands of red-light camera violations at the Cicero and Cal Sag intersection.
Lawyers representing plaintiffs having interviewed Crestwood and SafeSpeed officials, attorney Tom Zimmerman, whose law firm is representing plaintiffs in the case, said Tuesday.
Zimmerman is seeking to have the litigation designated as a class action, with the request pending before Judge Pamela Meyerson.
Zimmerman said his firm has been contacted by more than 100 people who could potentially be members of the class.
Regarding Presta’s guilty plea and sentencing, Zimmerman said that plaintiffs are “pleased to see justice was served.”
“The admissions by the former mayor in the plea agreement support the allegations in our lawsuit,” he said.
One Crestwood resident, Audrey Whipple, said that she had no particular complaints about how Presta ran the village.
“I never had any problems with him being a mayor. He knew how to take care of residents,” she said Monday outside Village Hall.
The 75-year-old said that she had not followed the mayor’s federal case but noted “it caused a stir” in the community.
“It’s a shame he got into that trouble over such a little bit of money,” Whipple said.
John Santos said he had heard some news reports about the charges against Presta but that he “chalked it up to just living in Cook County.”
“It just seems like you always hear about politicians and corruption and it’s really sad,” he said. “I didn’t know him but you just get tired about hearing (stuff ) like this.”
Presta, a protégé of longtime Mayor Chester Stranczek, was elected to a third term as mayor while under federal indictment. As mayor he made sure to take care of the senior citizens who were always a solid bloc of supporters, and resurrected a program rebating to residents part of the village’s portion of their property tax bills.
“He’s brought money into the town, he’s brought commercial development into the town,” his attorney, Thomas Breen, told the court. “He’s a humble, hardworking human being who has been a great asset to the Crestwood community.”
Judge Durkin didn’t give Presta any extra credit for simply performing his job.
The judge said a steady stream of incidents involving corruption “makes people cynical about public officials.”
Early last October, Presta had given a resignation letter to trustees, explaining that serious health problems made him unfit to continue serving and urged board members to quickly name an interim mayor.
The resignation came following a September telephone hearing in the bribery case in which Presta’s attorney told Durkin that a plea agreement was in the works.
At the time, the Village Board was contemplating creating a new job of economic development director, which would have paid $65,000 a year, the same salary Presta was getting as mayor. Presta said at the time that if the position was created, he would fill it.
Two days after saying he planned to resign, however, Presta said he was postponing that decision based on the advice of his doctors, the village manager and the village attorney.
After Presta’s resignation in November, his son-in-law, newly elected Trustee Kenneth Klein, was named by the Village Board as interim mayor. He ran with Presta in the spring 2021 election and will be eligible to run for a full term as mayor in the spring 2023 election.
Presta had been a village trustee 19 years before running for his first term as mayor in 2013.
John Toscas, who was a village trustee, ran against Presta in 2013, then again in 2021 after Presta was indicted.
In 2013, voter turnout in Crestwood was 33%, and Presta garnered 44% of the vote, 1,133 votes, to 37% for Toscas, who had 954 votes, according to Cook County election data. A third candidate, Dino Pavoni, received 490 votes or 19% of ballots cast.
In the spring 2021 election, 24% of Crestwood’s registered voters cast ballots, with Presta having pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, which were announced in August 2020. Presta received 1,315 votes, or 62%, with Toscas garnering 730 votes, or 34.4%.
Toscas, an attorney, said Monday he was “a little shocked (Presta) received such a light sentence.”
“I feel this is the first step to rid the village of corruption that has existed for years and years,” he said.
After Presta was indicted, Toscas said the issue came up repeatedly as he campaigned in his 2021 bid to unseat the mayor.
“Most of the residents told me it was a big mistake and that it would come out as a campaign contribution,” he said.
Presta had, at one point, amended his financial disclosure statement in his bid for a county commissioner’s seat to show the $5,000 from SafeSpeed as being a campaign contribution. Breen, at the sentencing hearing, said Presta didn’t spend the money on himself but bought “drinks and dinners” for campaign workers.
The judge said that only Presta was privy to how that money was spent, but that “you didn’t take the bribe to feed a hungry family.”
Toscas said he believes a clean slate is needed.
“They have to start with a whole new board and new mayor and I’m not going to say it’s going to be me,” Toscas said.