City mum on speed camera ticket tally since Jan. 1

How many speed camera tickets has Baltimore City issued so far this year? How many red-light camera tickets? City officials won't say.

Five weeks ago, Khalil Zaied, deputy chief of operations in the mayor's office, told members of the City Council that the lucrative automated camera enforcement network had started coming back online. More than a month had passed since the system went offline, the result of a troubled transition from one contractor to another.

"What we have is now 10 speed cameras out on locations," he said Feb. 4. "We have approximately 15 of the red-light cameras on board right now also. So we're ahead of schedule, actually, of completing everything by, as we told everyone, by the end of March — having everything up, full complement of locations."

But records posted on a city website don't show any automated citations recorded since Jan. 1, except for a few red-light tickets. The last speed camera ticket was from Dec. 31.

There's a roughly two-week lag between when a speeding violation is recorded and the tickets go out, so any tickets recorded before the fourth week in February would have posted by now under the previous system.

In an email Friday, Transportation Department spokeswoman Adrienne Barnes said only that "citation information will be posted transparently on the city website in the coming weeks and months as the transition to new technology and a new vendor continues to ramp up. With a new vendor in place, independent monitoring, and increased police staffing, we began issuing citations."

Barnes did not respond to a follow-up question asking again for the number. Zaied did not reply to an email Friday about his comments to the City Council.

scalvert@baltsun.com