After Taylor laid out his legal arguments, council woman Melissa Noriega interjected. "Are you billing for this?" she asked. "You've been here a long time."
"I am," Taylor responded. "My client is Keep Houston Safe." What Taylor didn't reveal is that Keep Houston Safe is a political action committee funded almost entirely by the camera vendor ATS, and that Taylor is one of ATS's lead attorneys. (And he wasn't kidding when he claimed that some thought this was a conspiracy against minorities. Keep Houston Safe, represented by Taylor's law office, would sue the city of Houston in federal court a few days after the council meeting for violation of the 1973 Voting Rights Act: Dilution of minority voting. The case would be quickly dismissed.) ATS had officially slithered into the game.
photo by Mandy Oaklander
Citizens Against Red Light Cameras spent far less than their competitors, but ultimately won Prop 3. Campaign manager Philip Owens, center, worked with researcher Craig Stewart (to his left) and consultant Ron Jackson (to his right) to spread the message.
photo by Mandy Oaklander
When Byron Schirmbeck began investigating the program in Baytown, he says he found a web of deceit from the city and ATS. He circulated a petition that turned the cameras off for good, and now he's doing the same for other Texas towns.
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By the time Michael Kubosh addressed the council, a clear majority seemed ready to put it on the ballot. Kubosh, a committee finance chairman for the Harris County Republican Party, was amused by Taylor's remarks. "When are Republicans worried about minority votes being diluted?" he asked the crowd.
When his time had expired, Parker leaned into her microphone, a self-assured smile on her face. "Mr. Kubosh, you and I visited before the council meeting started, and do you recall what I said to you?" she asked evenly. She didn't pause for an answer. "That I was gonna be as fair as I possibly could, but that I was gonna beat you fair and square at the ballot box on this one."
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ATS is the largest red-light camera provider in the United States. According to a company spokesman, the vendor has hung more than 6,000 red-light cameras across the country. In Texas alone, ATS has red-light camera contracts with 25 cities besides Houston. One of those is nearby Baytown.
Byron Schirmbeck, a 41-year-old Internet salesman, didn't think much about the cameras when they went up in Baytown in 2008. After all, he was a law-abiding citizen, a careful driver. One day Schirmbeck made a turn while, he claimed, the light was yellow. "As I was in the middle of my turn, I saw one of the flashes go off," he said. He figured the flash was for someone else, until he got the ticket. "I took a look at it and said, something's just not right, because that light was pretty quick," Schirmbeck said. The yellow time printed on the ticket was 3.1 seconds. After some digging, Schirmbeck found the law that governs camera-monitored intersections. He was surprised to see all kinds of restrictions, adopted by a bitter House as consolation for having the cameras. One of them dictates the time a light must be yellow at a camera-monitored intersection based on the speed limit. At the one where Schirmbeck was caught, it's four seconds.
Schirmbeck figured the light was malfunctioning, so he went to the city. He didn't expect to encounter such a huge wall of resistance. "They didn't want to answer any questions about anything," he said. Schirmbeck got suspicious. He grabbed his stopwatch and hit the streets, finding other illegally short yellow lights. The city, he said, denied that they had to follow the law since they signed the ATS contract before the code went into effect. Schirmbeck was livid, demanding that the city refund tickets issued on illegally short yellow lights or face a citizen uprising that would take down the cameras. "Basically," Schirmbeck said, "they didn't believe me."
Murmurs spread of a petition drive. The city dismissed Schirmbeck's ticket for administrative reasons, but that didn't stop him. Schirmbeck kept timing that fateful yellow light, finding it lengthened at first but then shortened a couple months later. "When I caught them again, instead of lengthening the yellow lights, they illegally lowered the speed limit from 45 to 40," he said. Schirmbeck confronted the city yet again, and they replaced the original speed limit and lengthened the yellow light.
The hijinks only escalated when Schirmbeck started requesting data from the city. "What we saw was when we got them to extend the yellow light just up to the bare minimum legal time, the violations that the cameras recorded dropped from like over 1,500 to about 700. In half," Schirmbeck said. He found another disturbing trend. According to Baytown's documents, the cameras weren't recording significantly fewer violations as the program continued. "They couldn't say they were changing people's behavior because the violations weren't dropping," Schirmbeck said. "So what they did was they started sending fewer tickets to Baytown to review." ATS's rejection rate climbed from 37 percent to around 51 percent.
When Schirmbeck filed a public information request asking for billing records for the red-light camera program, he received a list of thousands of names of people who had paid their violations by check — along with their routing numbers, account numbers and check numbers. Panicked, he notified the city, which mailed out letters to everyone on the list that their banking information had been compromised. And, in another serious lapse of privacy judgment, the city referred callers to Schirmbeck. "When people would call Baytown, they would say, 'Who has my information?' They'd say, 'Well this guy Byron does. If you want to talk to him, here's his number,'" Schirmbeck said. His cell phone rang nonstop.
