Speeding Tickets For Fun and Profit

I was driving to Las Vegas one night earlier this week to pick up my wife from the airport.

Before I get to today's actual piece, I just wanted to comment on the fact that government stupidity and incompetence have ruined two things I used to love.

The first is air travel.  I once loved the entire airline experience, from the greeting of enthusiastic skycaps when you pulled up in front of the airport to the excitement of showing the ticket agent your reservation for some exotic destination like Indianapolis.

Now, thanks to the government's inability to protect its people and refusal to apply a half-ounce of common sense in determining who might be a threat, the run-up (or more like "crawl-up" in one of those TSA lines) to flying on an airplane has become an excruciating endeavor that rivals a root canal for enjoyment.

The other is Las Vegas.

I once loved Las Vegas like no other city.  My wife and I got married there, long before we moved out west.  The lights, the neon, the impending excitement.

Now I would prefer a good rectal exam with knitting needles over venturing to that disaster zone of a city, due to the fact that practically every damn inch of asphalt in that zip code is under construction, recently finished with construction, or is about to undergo construction.

On the recent trip to the airport I mentioned, I endured the joy of sitting at a dead stop on I-215 at 11:30 at night on a Tuesday because the IIC (Idiots In Charge) decided to close four of the five lanes to do some sort of road maintenance.  I'm not sure what they were doing, but they had a couple of large pieces of equipment that resembled Imperial Walkers from the Star Wars movies creeping along the roadway.  They weren't paving or tearing up pavement.  It almost looked like they were simply cleaning the surface.  Four out of the five lanes.  What made it even more infuriating is that this piece of highway was built less than 10 years ago, and had just been repaved within the last 3 years (in keeping with the Las Vegas law that states "what happens in Vegas...must be repaved every fifth full moon).  Because of the constant traffic congestion and incessant road construction, I now hate Las Vegas and any cause that drags me there.

But back to the real thrust of this week's story.

While heading out of town Tuesday night, I noticed a Mesquite police car hiding in a median behind one of the mini-mountains on I-15 west of town.  It was obviously running a "traffic enforcement operation," which is cop-eze for what regular people refer to as a speed trap.

I've seen this a few times, and I always find it odd.  Why is a city police car doing traffic stops on the interstate?  Jurisdictionally, that's the province of the Nevada Highway Patrol.  Even the Las Vegas Metro Police Department (southern Nevada's version of the sheriff's department) shies away from handing out traffic tickets on the federal highways.

The obvious answer is: money.  Writing up speeders on their way to Dubuque can be a cash cow, especially since most out-of-staters receiving these unwelcome municipal greeting cards won't be coming back this way to dispute the charges.

Every once in a while we also get lucky and catch somebody moving a trunk full of crystal meth or other illicit substances, because we have one of the best and sharpest police departments in the west, with one of the highest "solve" rates in the country.  That's a good thing.

But make no mistake, the real impetus is fines and cash for city coffers.

And that begs the question: is it worth it?

Is hiding in the bushes with a radar gun like a big-bellied Jackie Gleason-type from Hickwater, Georgia really the image a tourist town like Mesquite wants to convey?  Do we really want the reputation of being nothing more than a money-grubbing speed trap aiming to fleece the last dime from broke gamblers leaving Las Vegas? 

It's a legitimate question with a very concrete divide. 

There is a definable financial cost to creating and maintaining an image.  It's why the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority spends millions of dollars each year on TV commercials around the country trying to show the shiny side of Sin City (while spending about $15 a year to mention its ugly step sister, Mesquite).  Tennessee has jumped on the same bandwagon, burning millions on television ads hyping the beauty of the state.  (The truth is that I've been to Tennessee, and Nashville is every bit as filthy as New York City's Bowery).  Even the perennially impoverished state of California finds a few million each year to lie to the rest of the country about why they should pack up and move to a place that obscenely overtaxes its citizens and overburdens its businesses with untenable fees and rules.

There is a cost to develop and maintain a friendly, welcoming image.

The question for Mesquite is: do we take in enough money from our interstate speed traps to offset the amount of marketing money we'll need to spend to lure in new visitors to replace the passersby we've alienated with traffic tickets?

For every $100 we collect in speeding fines, how many hundreds in image damage are we losing to the enraged insurance salesman who is telling all 200 of his Jackson Hole Kiwanis buddies about the "jerks in Mesquite who bushwhacked him."

Then you have the radio.

Truckers are eagle-eyed about spotting "bears with Kodaks" (CB talk for police running radar).  They're also notorious gossips, which means our unfriendly speed-trapping ways are being gabbed about from Tucson to Tucumcari.

Once again, it comes down to a lack of direction and leadership from City Hall, and the fact that we STILL don't know what we as a city want to be when we grow up.  Do we want to be a tourist destination, where people equate the word "Mesquite" with friendship, hospitality, and fun?  Or do we want to be a caricature in a road movie where our official slogan has changed from "Come for a day, stay for a lifetime" to "Y'all ain't from around here, are ya?"

I'm not sure which way is best.  I want to be from a town known for its golf, gaming, and good times.  But it might be more lucrative in these difficult economic days to collect speed trap tolls from passing motorists.

Who knows.  If we hand out enough $200 tickets, we might be able to one day afford our own national TV commercials touting Mesquite as the next incarnation of Oz, complete with the ending disclaimer "pay no attention to that man behind the bushes with the radar gun."