Red Light Camera News TX: Red-light camera cash not reaching trauma rooms
Red-light camera cash not reaching trauma rooms
Jan 8, 2012 4:25pm
DALLAS (AP) — At least $46 million in revenue from red-light camera tickets, intended to help fund trauma centers across Texas, sits in Austin instead as lawmakers use it to back certification of a balanced state budget.
Cities are sending in the state's cut of their red-light camera fines, as required by state law, The Dallas Morning News ( ) reported in Sunday's edition.
But the dollars stay there. What lawmakers initially had intended to be a steady stream of state funding for trauma systems at hospitals statewide has been interrupted.
The Texas Constitution requires a balanced budget of the biennial Legislature, and lawmakers rely on revenue estimates for the next two-year budget cycle as a limit on projected spending. Any money already in the state general revenue account, including earmarked funds like the red-light camera proceeds, can be counted toward that total.
And the last year has been a torturous one for the state as it faced a $27 billion budget shortfall, and Texas lawmakers withheld a record $4.1 billion generated by earmarked taxes and fees in their 2010 session.
"In the past, the state has appropriated trauma funds. However, the state was in a difficult budgetary situation" Stephen Polunsky, spokesman for state Sen. John Carona, told the newspaper. The Dallas Republican had authored the bill that set aside red-light camera ticket proceeds for trauma centers.
"When times are good, they appropriate more out of it, and when times are rotten ... they appropriate less of it," Billy Hamilton, a former deputy Texas state comptroller, told the newspaper.
In a 2010 analysis of Texas trauma rooms, the American College of Surgeons said such a steady flow of funding is necessary to meet the increasing trauma room needs of a state growing as rapidly as Texas.
John McWhorter, president of Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, worries that the dollars will never reach the trauma rooms.
"The Legislature can, at the stroke of a pen, allocate those funds to something else. Our biggest fear is that these funds will be swept up in the general Legislature, and we'll never see those funds," he told the newspaper.
"The most critical element for the public to understand is how fragile this trauma network is," McWhorter said.
The withheld funds have given additional ammunition to foes of red-light cameras.
"This is just another lie we were told," Byron Schirmbeck told the newspaper.
The Baytown man petitioned successfully to have the cameras taken down in his Houston suburb.
"They sell the system to the public by saying that all this money will come back to the community, to the trauma centers. But the state is holding on to the money," he said.
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Information from: The Dallas Morning News, http://www.dallasnews.com
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