1030, so we'll get started.

Um, my name's Donna Moore.

I am chair of public safety, and this is a joint meeting between public safety and the finance committee.

I have joining with me today uh counselors Marty Nave, Councillor Rashida Caldwell, Counselor Helen Hudson, and Councilor Petrona Jones Rouser.

And if you guys want to introduce yourselves.

Good morning, counselors.

Craig Whitmer with the Office of Analytics Performance and Innovation.

And Leah Whitmer, the director and chief administrative law judge of the municipal violations bureau.

Okay.

Um I'll let you guys start.

Thank you so much, Counselor.

So we have prepared a sort of general moment in time presentation that will provide uh some kind of summary data points, try to give an update of uh where the program's at so far, recognizing that we're not going to be able to provide full data until the school year is done to be able to really inform uh high-level decision making or anything like that.

So uh we're hoping that we can kind of give a general overview, um have a few discussion points to raise and kind of ask questions to you on how uh being involved in different components going forward will be best, um, and then answer any questions.

Okay.

So uh agenda for today, we're gonna provide a little bit of background history, uh, talk about program exact objectives, run through the timeline a little bit, talk to some summary data points, then talk about next steps.

I do want to also point out that we have um our vendor here, uh, representatives from Genoptic who will be able to speak to um some more specific pro uh questions for the program if they come up.

So a little bit on the background of this.

So this is a program that was started under the Walsh administration, the goal being uh to ensure student and resident safety.

If you recall um when this was initially brought to the council and approved, there was a significant uptick in the number of students who are being injured uh in and around school zones, uh in and around uh Syracuse and the central New York region.

Uh overall, this is looking to uh meet the mark on Vision Zero.

So that's the goal of zero fatalities in streets, and then over the long term, uh the goal of this program is not just to be able to kind of uh automate enforcement in school zones and the surrounding areas, but um understand what does continuous improvement look like.

If we are uh monitoring enforcement um on certain streets, if there is um speedsters, for example, that are being driven to side streets, does it make sense to implement safety measures like uh speed bumps there?

Uh we've had some discussions about that, but uh overall trying to uh improve over time.

You said it doesn't make sense or it makes sense.

Does it make sense?

Trying to understand what is continuous improvement uh in automated enforcement look like over time.

Gotcha.

So just for a timeline um between and this is when it was approved between 2023 and 2024.

Really, there's a little bit more that happened in 2019, but for the programs that we're going to discuss today, that's uh school bus stop arm, red light cameras, and school speed zone cameras, New York State authorized city-level demonstration programs for automated enforcement between 2023 and 2024.

Um here locally, between September of 2023 and 2024, we go through the process of uh RFP's bid and contract award for all three programs.

Um, and good to keep in mind that we went from not doing any form of automated enforcement to doing uh three programs, the the first municipality in the state to do that.

Uh the school bus stop our morning period began in May.

Um, and then between September and October of 2025, we did a warning period for um speed and red light.

Uh, there was probably an uptick in the number of calls everyone received.

Uh, if you recall, we had about 180,000 warnings issued, uh, mostly for uh speed cameras, but again, we chose to do a 60-day warning period uh because we knew that this was going to be such a tremendous shift, um, and because we really wanted to ensure that um the community uh understood that we were taking um ensuring residents knew what was going on seriously.

So September 17th, uh I'm sorry, I made an error here.

It should be September 17th, 2025.

Uh, we had a special committee meeting here with all of you to discuss.

We engaged in a pretty significant conversation then, and um November 3rd, 2025.

Again, my apologies, the dates are wrong here.

Um, ticketing began um two months into the school year of 2025.

So what have we kind of achieved over the last few months?

So if you look at the data from November to April, so that's when we started enforcing uh these numbers look a little bit different if you were to count the warning period, but because it's SKUs so heavy, we wanted to focus on uh November and April.

Um you're seeing about 55 fewer violations per school day.

So you've dropped from about 1300 to about 575.

Um that 46% decline in the most dangerous speeders uh going from November through April.

So we're talking about folks that are driving uh what is that, a 66 and a 30, something like that.

Um the the real threats to uh life and limb.

Um, you know, 41% of the tickets, and there will be a slide about this next, about 41 of those percent of those tickets are going outside of the city of Syracuse.

So we're talking about a third of that.

Um about a third of the tickets are going to uh the suburbs in the general central New York region, and about 8% are going out of state.

Uh, if we look a little bit deeper into that out of state number, a pretty significant portion of that are going to uh enterprise rent a car or Avis, right?

Your car rentals.

So um the city residents' share of citations declines over time, right?

And um don't want to say that there's like a causal effect here, very much want to wait until probably July or August until we can really dig in a little bit more on full school year data to be able to take any conclusions, things like that.

But you we started at about a 60-40 split in November where residents were receiving about 60% of those tickets to in April, that's dropped about 7% down to 55%.

So, you know, the the top line hopeful interpretation of this is that city residents are changing their behavior uh over time, kind of adjusting to the program.

And we see how that bears out uh kind of in your more high-level data.

So from a program ticketing perspective, um, the total revenue that we've collected so far, that's um about 3.8 million dollars, and because of the split with us and our vendor, we've brought in about 2.4 million dollars.

Uh there's roughly 2 million dollars of tickets eligible for collections right now.