HomeMy WebLinkAboutSB 1330 LTR to Simitian 20120509ul)
ocit o � sis oSPO/OFFICE OF THE CITY COUNCIL
�/g O990 Palm Street ■ San Luis Obispo, CA 93401-3249 ■ 805/781-7119
May 9, 2012
VIA FACSIMILE 916-651-4- T
The Honorable Joe Simitian
California State Senate
State Capitol Building, Room 2080
Sacramento, CA 95814
RE: SB 1330 (Simitian). License plate recognition technology
NOTICE OF OPPOSITION
Dear Senator Simitian:
The City of San Luis Obispo respectfully opposes your Senate Bill 1330 because of the
loss of revenue and additional burdens it would create for public agencies like ours.
SB 1330 was recently amended with the intent to only address private vendors' use of
license plate recognition (LPR) technology but cities like ours will still feel the direct impacts.
LPR technology plays an important role in many police department duties including recovery of
stolen property and locating suspect vehicles.
S13 1330 would create an overwhelming burden on our police department. The bill
requires our police department to provide a search warrant to access LPR data maintained by a
private vendor, and also to notify any person within five days if their record has been accessed.
In many instances, hundreds of records are pulled based on partial license plate characters or a
time and location reference. It is hard to understand the benefit of spending valuable police
department staff hours contacting all registered owners (who may not have even been the driver
at the time), who would be quickly dismissed as soon make and model information is received.
In addition to direct law enforcement duties, LPR data is used to help collect unpaid
parking citations, which the Department of Motor Vehicles estimates total $500 million
statewide. Cities are struggling to keep services and staff in place, including public safety
personnel, during this economic downturn. Unpaid parking citations represent a hole in our local
general fund. Many cities rely on private vendors to process their parking citations using LPR
data. In fact, 85% of parking authorities, which includes colleges, port authorities and local
government, rely on contractors to process their parking citations and improve collection.
Citation fines are paid after a vehicle has been impounded for having five or more unpaid
parking citations. With the use of LPR data, on average, local governments are able to recover
city of san luis osmspo
Re: SB 1330
Mary 9, 2012
Page 2
approximately 14% of a city's outstanding parking ticket revenue. Simply stated, restricting the
use of vendor LPR data still directly hurts local agencies.
The state's revenue collection is also impacted. Currently, $12.50 of every local parking
citation is directed to state administered accounts, including state court facilities and state court
construction funds. In fiscal year 2011-12, this represents $97 million dollars according to the
Administrative Office of the Courts. When applying the 14% recovery rate with LPR
technology to the state share, at least $13 million per year is collected from outstanding local
parking citations.
For the above stated reasons, the City of San Luis Obispo opposes SB 1330.
Sincerely,
an Marx
Mayor
cc: City Council
Katie Lichtig
Robert Horch
Senator Sam Blakeslee, fax 916-445-8081
Assembly Member Katcho Achadjian, fax 916-319-2133
League of California Cities, via fax, 916-658-8240
David Mullinax, League of California Cities