A Long Island town reportedly wrote more than 80,000 tickets worth about $20 million to drivers who were allegedly caught on camera passing stopped school buses illegally — even though the local school boards hadn’t given the town permission to do so.
The town of Hempstead sent out the legions of tickets in Baldwin, Hempstead, Lawrence and the Valley Stream 13 district during the last two years, according to Newsday.
The only problem?
State and local laws require local school districts to approve writing bus camera tickets on their behalf — and the four southwest Nassau County districts did no such thing, officials told the outlet.
“It’s baffling to me that tickets would be issued when they know they did not have the authority to do it,” Baldwin Union Free School District Superintendent Shari Camhi told Newsday.
That raises questions about whether the tens of thousands of tickets were wrongly written — and if they were, legal experts told the outlet that it could be the foundation for a class-action lawsuit.
The Lawrence school district went so far as to post a letter on its website declaring the tickets “void.”
New York has barred drivers from driving past buses picking up or dropping off kids for a long time, and a 2019 law let local governments install cameras and issue tickets to those who ignored the flashing stop signs that extend from the vehicle’s side.
But the local school districts still have to sign off on government initiatives to run the cameras on their district buses.
Hempstead passed its own bus camera law in 2022, then contracted with the private firm BusPatrol America to manage the program.
Since then, the town has written more than 270,000 bus-passing tickets, or about one for every three Hempstead residents.
BusPatrol keeps 45% of the revenue from the $250 tickets, while the town keeps the rest.
Although about 24 districts gave their blessing to the ticket program, another 50,000 citations were written in the Hempstead Union Free School District — even though it didn’t join the program.
Victor Pratt, president of Hempstead’s district school board, even got a ticket in-district after he allegedly passed a bus on South Franklin Street.
“It does strike me as odd,” Pratt told Newsday when asked why the town issued so many tickets in his district, which never approved the program.
“I’m trying to figure it out in my head.”
Hempstead Town officials said the tickets likely came from buses from participating districts that make stops in districts that aren’t involved.
“While the districts identified may not have opted in to have their school buses participate in the program at this current time, ticketing can and does still occur in these areas by any in-service school bus that originated from a school district that has opted into the program,” Hempstead Town spokesman Brian Devine said in a statement.
“There are no geographic limits on the program and enforcement of the state law can occur townwide by statute.”
But Joseph Aron, an attorney who has sued both the Town of Hempstead and Suffolk County over the camera program, said the tickets are only the latest problem with the program.
“The town has been routinely ignoring clear mandates of law and binding court precedent for issuing a notice of liability in the first place,” he said.
“So, it’s not surprising to learn that they’re issuing tickets without the required legal authority of various school districts.”