Submitted by Jonathan Redmond, District 11
At 1:25am on Tuesday,June 16th, the RTM took a vote on the Speed Cameras as presented by Chief of Police James Heavey. After a heated debate with over 50 people signed up to speak resulting in the RTM voting to limit the number of speakers and allowing the RTM to vote by 1:30am, the RTM voted in favor of reinstating the speed camera program by a vote of 100 for, 60 against, 3 abstaining and 67 members who did not vote. The program passed and the cameras will be reinstated in August.
However, that is not the end of the story. After analyzing the close to 250 emails sent to the RTM’s “All 230 RTM member email channel,” the data speaks to a tale of two towns – the members of the RTM elected to serve its constituents versus the residents of Greenwich. The chart below shows the details.
The “Percentage of RTM members Voting NO” column is the percentage of RTM members in each district that voted AGAINST Item #33 – Safety Plan/Speed Cameras. Over 240 Form Emails (All 230 RTM members email) were sent which is a large number of emails by comparison to other issues taken up by the RTM. Only 31 of these emails were FOR speed cameras. The “% of Form Emails Received by RTM Demanding Change or a NO Vote” is a measure of the emails demanding the program be altered in some way or voted down entirely. If someone emailed more than once, only the first email was counted in the statistics. As can be seen, the percentage of Greenwich residents who are against speed cameras far outweighs the number of RTM members who voted against them – 87% versus 38%.
On most issues the RTM takes up for a vote, Greenwich residents do not get involved and the RTM is trusted to make a judgement when voting. However, It seems odd that when Greenwich residents send such a strong signal to the RTM, their feedback is ignored. Other towns rejected speed cameras after a lengthy public debate. Unfortunately, we did not get that debate in Greenwich as the cameras were rolled out before any public involvement. Do the current members of the RTM represent the people in this town or have they decided to vote without listening to their constituents?
