William J. Healy

Nothing Fancy, Moving On

No ironic picture, and no fancy ‘I told you so’ here.  This is just a simple post to bring everything down to a simmer with the Redflex situation in the City of Canton.

It looks like the vote is not going to happen this coming Monday, or until the Mayor feels he has enough votes to ram it through city council (hopefully never).

I am still itching to start the petition to outlaw photo enforcement in Canton, Ohio.  I suppose though, I can promise not to embarrass the Mayor further by rubbing salt in the open wound.  The citizens have spoken, and the words are “no cameras.”   Let’s hope he’s got the listening hat on.

Steve McKinney has been invaluable in getting the facts about the way Redflex (and other system operators’ schemes work, and how they fail).  You should check out his in-depth coverage @ http://www.cantonredlightcameras.com if you haven’t already.

I’ve been a little busy, so I didn’t know about the March 17th meeting that the City Council Members (and Mayor apparently) had.  I’m happy the citizens turned out in such numbers and voiced their opinions against the Red Light Camera scheme.

I was all set to help join all the anti-photo enforcement groups together to stop HB 2 or get it repealed because our State Legislature was trying to put Photo Enforcement Radar Speed Cameras out in construction zones all over Ohio.  At $300 a pop, that’s an expensive reminder not to speed in construction zones, and unnecessary too!  People do slow down in construction zones, many times they are empty, but with that scheme, it wouldn’t cost them anything to sit someone in a vehicle doing paperwork and call the construction zone “occupied” so they could rack up the fines.

85% or so of injuries and accidents in construction zones are not caused by motorists!  Talk about another dubious safety scheme that ends up being nothing but a blatant cash grab!

Anyway, since that looks like it’s a dead issue (so far), I’ve decided to move on to a series of posts with ideas of what could really be done to help improve the City of Canton.  I could have gone negative and reported on all the shenanigans and political fighting and such that’s going on with the Mayor, Council, etc, but I feel that The Stark County Political Report is doing an excellent job thoroughly covering those stories, as well as reporting on the conflict of interest and The Repository’s kinda sorta softball coverage of anything to do with Mayor Healy.  I alluded to having suspicions about their coverage of the Redflex issues in my previous blog post, but I didn’t expect the truth to out so quickly!

Anyway, I’ve got a minimum of five good blog posts about how A Mayor could help to turn the City of Canton around.  Maybe more than that, so check back later to read some zany common sense ideas from yours truly, Nicholas Cincinat.

Thanks for reading, hope to see you back here soon (no I am not spying on you!  I only know how many views my blog gets in a month! That’s all).

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Thursday, March 19th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments