The people of Sykesville have every right to decide against having speed cameras in their community, as they did this week when they voted solidly to overturn a local ordinance allowing them near schools. But the reasoning involved in both sides of the debate is a microcosm of the particular kind of dysfunction that's now prevalent in America's centuries-old ambivalence about government.
It seems clear that speeding is a legitimate problem in the small Carroll County town. The police chief says speeding on residential streets is the biggest complaint he gets, and a survey done near Sykesville Middle School found 800 people a day going more than 12 miles an hour over the speed limit. But the seven-member Sykesville Police Department doesn't have the manpower to set up speed traps to catch the lead-feet – as it is, one position on the department is being kept vacant because of budget constraints.
Sykesville's mayor, Mike Miller, figured, probably correctly, that town residents had no appetite for a tax increase at the moment – and in the middle of a recession, who could blame them? So the speed cameras, which issue $40 tickets, the proceeds of which go to city coffers, seemed like a way to kill two birds with one stone. In another time, this might have been applauded as innovative thinking.
But not now. A local resident named Chris Martin started a petition drive to stop the cameras on the grounds that they somehow represent an abridgement of the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He told the Eldersberg Eagle that he feels "an obligation to protect those rights when I feel they're being threatened." What rights are those, exactly? The right to speed?
Despite the fact that many community residents see speeding as a scourge, the voters in the referendum rejected speed cameras because they saw them not as a safety device but as a money grab. This notwithstanding fact that the state is actually losing money on the cameras it has installed near construction zones because people figured out quickly that speeding was an expensive proposition and changed their behavior.
So what we're left with in Sykesville is a town that doesn't want speeders but also doesn't want the government to do anything that would actually be effective in stopping them. This has a bit of a "get your government hands off my Medicare" feel to it. The police chief is right to wonder what he's supposed to do next. Unfortunately, the answer might be to just wait until the nation grows out of its collective snit.