Today, that money flows like honey to the MRCA, now surpassing $2 million annually and comprising 8 percent of its $29 million budget in 2010.
The ticketing and revenue numbers are huge, given that just seven cameras are involved. By comparison, the now-defunct L.A. city red-light cameras, which had been turned on at 32 heavily trafficked urban intersections, produced about 40,000 tickets per year.
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER HOEY
Courtney and Ted Balaker are infuriated by what Ted calls "these shakedowns."
PHOTO BY SIMONE PAZ
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Protecting that income has become important to authority executive director Joseph T. Edmiston. In 2010, Edmiston won a special exemption from California law so that the mountains authority — alone among local California agencies — can set its own traffic rules, hold its own initial traffic hearings and then collect the money.
Edmiston refused to discuss his agency's stop-sign cameras, which are the subject of a class-action lawsuit. But a spokeswoman, Dash Stolarz, insists that the seven cameras are crucial to keeping park roads safe.
Stolarz describes "Top of Reseda," the dead end of Reseda Boulevard in Tarzana, which leads into Marvin Braude Mulholland Gateway Park, as a "notorious speedway as people charge down the hill, ignoring the bicycles and people going by."
And the twisty road serving Franklin Canyon, she says, is used "to bypass traffic jams on Coldwater Canyon. [Drivers] say, 'Oh, there's nobody around.' The cars come whipping around and it's unbelievably dangerous. We put in speed bumps and stop signs, etc. It's extremely dangerous, and we're not going to tolerate it."
Yet the MRCA, which can afford to send a team to court to fight a single $175 ticket, cannot produce any records to back up its claims of actual danger.
In fact, the Weekly has learned, the danger is being exaggerated. Los Angeles Police Department data show no serious accidents have occurred at the seven locations for the past eight years, either pre- or postcameras.
Lt. Andy Neiman, an LAPD spokesman, after poring over data from 2005 to 2012 for streets adjacent to the seven stop-sign cameras, such as the 3500 block of Reseda Boulevard and the 3600 block of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, concludes, "We have not completed any traffic investigations at those locations, or at least if we did respond to a collision, they did not meet the criteria requiring a traffic report."
MRCA supervising ranger Jewel Johnson insists, "We're not going to wait until people get killed."
Her argument echoes one made for years by Los Angeles city officials, who agreed to turn off the city's 32 red-light cameras only after anticamera activist Beeber proved, using detailed accident data from LAPD records, that L.A. streets were no safer under red-light camera ticketing.
Johnson, a ranger since 1997, argues that the millions of dollars in ticket costs borne by local mountain visitors is justifiable because, "Unlike city streets, you can walk on our access roads (but) you can't walk down Ventura Boulevard. We want people to take their time in the park."
However, a fierce critic of the authority's ticketing program, Jack Allen, a retired Beverly Hills city attorney, says that what's really unfolding is, "They set up a joint powers authority so they can do anything they want. It's a real gimmick."
The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which was established by the California State Legislature in 1980, has been headed since then by Edmiston. While he has been praised for his stewardship in helping create recreational facilities and saving more than 60,000 acres from development, he also has been portrayed as pugnacious and high-handed, running the conservancy and the MRCA like fiefdoms.
Allen could be considered a frenemy of Edmiston's. They worked in the early 1980s to help create Franklin Canyon and Temescal Gateway parks. But Allen has for years fiercely opposed the stop-sign cameras, calling them illegal and a "rotten way to treat people." Today he sees Edmiston as a "con artist" who got around state law. In recent years, Allen says, he has "bitterly opposed" Edmiston on several issues, including the cameras.
In 2005, Los Angeles magazine called Edmiston "L.A.'s most powerful unelected official." Edmiston also is said to have acquired an Ahab-like focus on building the so-called Backbone Trail, which will stretch from Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades to Point Mugu in Ventura County, with Malibu Creek State Park in the middle. By 2010, 62 miles of Backbone Trail had been completed. Another three miles or so will be completed soon, says the National Park Service.
Meanwhile, government spending on parks and recreation has been slashed. To help make up the losses, the MRCA has widened its fundraising efforts. Buried on its website (mrca.ca.gov) under "Ordinance" is Section 4.2, which allows for "automated motor vehicle enforcement ... any photographic or video equipment linked to any violation-detection system that synchronizes the taking of a photograph, video or digital image with the occurrence of a violation."
The seven cameras record a detailed image of the violator's license plate, the time and location. When the citation arrives in the mail weeks later, it includes a sworn statement signed by a mountains authority officer or employee that "based on inspection of the recorded images, the subject motor vehicle was being operated in violation ..."
According to Allen, one Los Angeles– area woman got seven tickets before she realized there was a stop-sign camera pointed at the rear license plate on her car — or that she was a dangerous driver and violator. She had been taking her child to a regular activity in the park.
