Hollister officials are at an impasse: They can’t stop drivers
from speeding and they can’t stop the budget from bleeding.
But that won’t keep them from trying. Senior city leaders and
police officials are working together
– regardless of serious funding shortages – on possible
strategies to curb traffic violators in town.
Hollister officials are at an impasse: They can’t stop drivers from speeding and they can’t stop the budget from bleeding.
But that won’t keep them from trying. Senior city leaders and police officials are working together – regardless of serious funding shortages – on possible strategies to curb traffic violators in town.
For now, Police Chief Jeff Miller won’t reveal specifics about potential enforcement alterations; he’s planning on approaching the City Council before he talks publicly on his ideas. But he acknowledged a need for increased traffic enforcement – and meanwhile, concurrently, the drawback of running a lean department.
“We don’t have the resources right now,” he said.
The Hollister Police Department currently employs 34 sworn officers, Miller said. Of those, 17 are assigned to patrol and cover three shifts a day, seven days a week.
He hinted at potentially cutting other service areas of the department and altering priorities; traffic issues, he said, are high on the list. He also mentioned using other means – besides extra enforcement – to slow residents, such as additional radar trailers and more aggressive outreach from the department to the community.
And it’s not just speeders breeding dangerous roadway conditions, according to Miller, who met with City Manager Dale Shaddox on Friday morning for about an hour. It’s residents rolling through stop signs; drivers running red lights; people stealing the right of way at intersections. It’s a slew of careless habits, officials say.
“If it’s possible, I believe that a traffic speed enforcement program by police officers is the most effective way to address the problem,” Shaddox said. “It’s not going to solve the problem. It won’t even get close to solving the problem.”
Hollister can’t spearhead a consummate program, he said, “to the degree we need one.” But then again, other cities can’t, either.
“There is a speeding problem in every community and every neighborhood in the United States,” said Shaddox, who has worked in city government for 30 years.
Nearly two years ago, responding to a group of incensed citizens who voiced concerns about careless driving on Clearview Drive, the Council commissioned a “traffic calming study” for $18,000.
The document, its finality officially approved in August, concluded that population growth has caused much of the increase in traffic problems during recent decades; the citizenry jumped from 11,500 in 1980 to the current 36,400, according to city records.
As potential solutions, the study includes several maps of targeted streets. Among its objectives, it calls for increased enforcement, along with others, such as raising intersections or adding stop signs.
Some officials, such as Councilman Tony LoBue, believe concerted use of the traffic study would be the most logical way to curb impatient driving habits during the budget situation.
“That’s going to be the most efficient use of our dollars,” LoBue said.
Councilman Robert Scattini, also the county marshal and formerly a CHP officer for 19 years, pointed out he hadn’t been elected yet when the city hired the traffic consultant. He would have fought its approval, he insisted.
And while he says city staff members could have steered the study themselves, Scattini isn’t necessarily against all of its principles. Restraining traffic negligence, he said, mostly depends on escalating enforcement.
The Hollister Police Department has issued tickets for 1,583 “vehicle code violations” since Jan. 1, according to Capt. Bob Brooks. That includes 411 for stop sign violations and 223 for speeding.
During that same time – while the police department issued an average of only 0.7 speeding tickets per day – 394 accidents (or 1.24 per day) have occurred in the city. Two of those were on Clearview Drive.
“We definitely need to step it up by all means,” Scattini said.
Finding a way to do it, however, won’t be easy. The department is already under-staffed. And Shaddox has said the city, stymied by another forthcoming deficit, may cut 30 or more positions from the 175-person workforce by next July.
While it is unclear what departments will suffer the biggest blows, the police department will undoubtedly need to reshuffle priorities if it plans to increase traffic enforcement.
“It comes down to a matter of – what (services) are we going to cut?” Miller said.
Officials have also discussed other approaches to gridlock easement – aside from writing tickets – such as improved education and better traffic engineering.
Ideally, though, people would voluntarily slow down, Miller said. But he acknowledged that’s not a realistic ambition.
“It’s very difficult to do,” he said. “And sometimes it just takes a very harsh crackdown of giving lots of tickets.”
