“100% it’s a money grab.”
Nearly three months after he was fined for illegally passing a stopped school bus in Tampa, Lars Larson is still waiting for his chance to fight the $225 citation in court.
“I don't know, but I’m going to keep moving. They know where I live,” he told Investigative Reporter Katie LaGrone recently when asked when he thinks he will have his day in court.
Larson is one of over 65- thousand drivers in Hillsborough County alone who, since August, was cited after new school bus cameras captured him passing a school bus while it was stopped for kids.
Watch full report from Katie LaGrone on school bus cameras
The cameras are part of a new state law that lets districts record drivers who ignore the stop arm sign.
But Larson believes the video, which was included in his citation online, proves he did nothing wrong.
In one of the videos, Larson’s white Yukon can be seen parallel to the front of the school bus just as the bus’s stop arm begins to deploy. Larson, who’s a father of 5 young children, said he saw the bus but didn’t think he had to stop because he was already passing it when the stop arm was just beginning to deploy.
“I firmly believe I did not break the law, and I would also firmly believe that there's other people out there, like me,” he said.
In fact, there are.
Larson is one of over 2,000 drivers in Hillsborough County who believe they were cited unfairly and have opted to contest their violation in court but can’t.
As we first reported last month, the Hillsborough County school district, the local sheriff’s office and BusPatrol, the camera vendor, hastily rolled out this program without a legal process in place for drivers to fight back.
“100% it's a money grab,” Larson told us back in February when we were first in the state to expose how drivers were getting cited without the ability to challenge the citations in court.
Six weeks after our first report on the lack of due process with the new program, we’ve learned that Larson and others trying to fight their fines remain stuck in limbo
“It's just this waiting for snail mail, right,” Larson said.
Larson and others in Hillsborough County aren’t alone.
In Miami Dade, where BusPatrol also has cameras rolling on school buses, drivers who want to contest their citation are also waiting for a court date that has yet to come reported the Miami Herald recently. Issues over the program even left Miami’s sheriff to suspend issuing some citations after complaints from drivers who claimed they were being issued fines in error, the newspaper reported.
REVENUE OVER RIGHTS?
This lack of driver rights is now at the center of a recently filed class action lawsuit.
“You can't say, yes you will have the opportunity to be heard, but don't have the opportunity to be heard,” said Miami attorney Gino Moreno who filed the lawsuit a few weeks ago.
Moreno and his law partner, Arlenys Perdomo, said they’ve heard from hundreds of drivers who were cited and fined $225 for violations.
“It violates your constitutional rights to a hearing and to your day in court,” said Perdomo. ”If these people are just getting fined without any real process, it ultimately ends up being revenue over rights for these drivers,” she said.
VIOLATIONS CONTINUE GENERATING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
We’ve discovered that these new bus cameras continue to generate a lot of revenue.
In the first six months of this school year, more than 200,000 violations have been issued in Miami Dade and Hillsborough County, the two counties where BusPatrol is currently operating in Florida.
Those violations have generated more than $20 million dollars just in Miami Dade and another six million in Hillsborough County, according to figures provided to us by BusPatrol, which will also soon be operating cameras for Brevard and Broward counties.
Paid fines are divided between the school district that operates the buses, the local sheriff’s office that reviews and distributes violations, and BusPatrol, which gets the largest chunk of the cash—upwards of 70% of every paid fine in Florida.
Watch BusPatrol defend lack of due process and millions in profit
A spokesperson from the 13th Judicial Court in Hillsborough County wouldn’t explain why the process for contesting a violation in court has not been set up yet.
Watch BusPatrol defend lack of due process
In a text, court spokesperson Mike Moore stated, “Nothing new to update you on.”
In a court statement from the 11th Judicial Court in Miami, a spokesperson blamed the legislature for allowing these bus cameras but not providing the courts with the money to hear challenges like Larson’s. The statement reads in part:
“For reasons unknown, the language establishing the procedure by which contested NOVs [Notice of violation] are heard by the municipality or county’s own administrative staff was removed from the “school bus stop arm law.” As mentioned above, this process was placed on the courts without providing any funding for the courts to appoint more judges or hire more hearing officers to hear these new cases.”
In the same statement, spokesperson Eunice Sigler also said that hearings in Miami will begin “shortly.” According to the Clerk of Courts office, more than 1600 drivers in Miami have opted to contest their violation.
“At the end of the day, we all just want to move on and move on with our lives, not to sit around waiting for our next court date,” said Larson, who, along with thousands of others, is left doing just that after a new program intended to keep students safe appears to have been rushed to roll with no signs of stopping.
“No one is arguing kids’ safety and school safety. I think the complaint here is a system that's not fully functional,” he said.
"These should be freak accidents, not a natural disaster"
Dozens of Florida State University students and community allies marched through the streets of Tallahassee on Wednesday, demanding urgent action from state lawmakers on gun reform after a deadly campus shooting that left two dead and at least six others wounded.
