Fenton, population 226, brings in over $1 million per year through its mayor’s court, an unusual justice system in which the mayor can serve as judge even though he’s responsible for town finances.
We held a hearing about whether or not the mayor should also be the Judge. The mayor has decided that the mayor runs the court impartially and there is no need for a 3rd party magistrate.
“I’m the mayor after all”
“I am the Senate!”
All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.
The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government’s ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won’t affect their traffic fines.
They’ve committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They’ve given up.
It’s a town of 226 people, I don’t think they’re too interested in urban development or anything that would involve taxes instead of extorting out of towners.
Yes this village basically exists to give traffic tickets, and everyone else in the area hates them. Talking about building city infrastructure here is kind of absurd. Sure the mayor-judge could start attempting civil projects, but the 226 residents live there because of how things are now.
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They’re basically acting as modern day robber barons.
It’s Louisiana, they would go back to 1800 if they could.
The cynic in me feels the need to point out that this is Louisiana we’re taking about. This might be the most forward thinking policy they’ve had for decades.
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I’m generally for local control over local matters, but this shit should be illegal at the federal level. The right to due process is impossible to implement when the executive and judicial branches are run by the same person.
the most, worst, and most blatant corruption is usually in local government. it’s just so much harder to get people to notice or care until it’s like Flint Michigan water levels of bad.
Flint’s still fucked I believe.
Case in point.
It’s also much harder to investigate and shine a spotlight on it, since local news sources have been in decline for years. For many smaller metros, the only local news source may be a weekly newsletter or NPR affiliate, and those rarely have the investigative impact that an old-school local paper would have had, and small-town corruption has flourished like fungus in the dark.
yes! like, I’ve worked in local news, some of it is still ok. I think all tv news is too surface level to be that meaningful, but some local channels still try to actually investigate local things that matter.
but like you said, bigger cities have nothing like that. neither do small enough communities. and many local news companies have been gutted or taken as puppets by Sinclair or fts or whoever. I was working at a local fox affiliate in 2018. they weren’t bad when i started because they were owned by hearst. Hearst is a broadcast distributor that affects minimal control over the content its stations produce. they recognize the value is preserving the teams and practices of the stations they buy. in 2019 that were bought by Fox directly. after that we were required to run every second of trump talking and kept having national anti abortion stories pushed on us. we had almost no time available for local content and even the stuff that did get scheduled would get bumped by trump being late for a press conference. he was over an hour late on average and we had to sit there and wait for him through every second of it.
There’s gotta be some way to do something like turning NPR and PBS into a multi-media state funded NGO to support the news industry at the local, state, and national levels. Probably international too but that’d probably require oversight from the Dept of State because of the heightened risk of international journalists becoming political prisoners. Maybe making journalists diplomats as a shield for their reporting.
IDK how it’d all have to work, you need to balance the need to keep all tiers of journalism funded with the authoritarians who’d see that and immediately begin seeing opportunities to coerce desirable reporting.
This is the exact all powerful executive situation the foundation intended to stop from ever happening.
I found this telling (emphasis mine):
Mayor’s courts operate in a gray area of Louisiana law. Like municipal courts, they handle violations of local ordinances. Municipal judges must hold a law degree and pass the bar; a mayor can preside over court without meeting any qualifications. Yet, like a municipal judge, a mayor can impose fines or sentence people to jail.
Mayor’s courts must ensure defendants have fair trials. But unlike other courts in the state, they aren’t subject to rules like the Code of Criminal Procedure that are supposed to ensure courts are run fairly and properly.
Wow. Truly land of the free. /s How is this permitted to go without consequences?
In The United States we believe in freedom in the abstract and only the abstract.
My guess is no one has taken it to the Supreme Court.
I’d guess it’s because Louisianna law is based on Napoleonic Code rather the English common law. LA law can have oddities because of that.
And then we got someone below talking about Supreme Court, as if they would here such a case. This is one that would, and should, be deferred to a lower court.
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I’m from this area. A mayor got in trouble for embezzlement a few year ago. Look it up.
Does this town have a reputation?
the most expedient solution would be to drive nowhere near Fenton, LA
This is impossible. You have no choice but to drive through Fenton to get to lake Charles without at least an hour detour through moss bluff. I live in this area and my in-laws live in Fenton (it’s bigger than it seems. The town itself is small but the surrounding area has lots of home. A lot more than 225 people in the town too.) You just don’t speed. You get a warning sign about it changing to 50. Go 50. I used to pick up my buddy in kinder, one town over heading to lake Charles for work, and we would wait to light the blunt till we passed though.
I’ve seen this movie. Stars dan Aykroyd and John candy.
Nothing But Trouble is the movie for those curious.
Great movie, great actors.
Or just not break the speed limit?
I get the concerns about possible corruption (though the article didn’t show us anything in this regard), but I’m like what’s the problem? If you break the law you get a fine. I’d be more concerned about the paces where you don’t!
“Yeah, I clocked you going 20 over”
“But I was driving the speed limit”
“Take it up with the judge”
—Later—
“You were going 20 over, pay at the desk”
“But I was going the speed limit!”
“Got any proof?”
“No?”
“Then go pay at the desk”
More like “you were going 1 mph over, the law’s the law”
Speed trap towns aren’t reasonable. That’s the point.
No way they will be satisfied with the fine for 1mph over, they are going to crank that fine up as high as they can get away with. Which sounds like a lot.
Still, going 1mph over is usually a bit less expensive of a ticket than going 20mph over is. One is a speeding ticket. The other is typically a reckless driving ticket.
The article said they only write tickets for going more than 61mph in a 50mph zone. That’s 20% over, 44% longer brake distance if there is an accident and more noise for the people living nearby.
If this happens it will be a scandal. The article only showed cases of:
“Yeah, I clocked you going 20 over”
“I’ did, but will still fight the ticket in court”
“Take it up with the judge”“You were going 20 over, pay at the desk”
“All right, I actually did driver too fast. But it’s not fair!!!”
“Alright, go pay at the desk”So I’ll wait until someone can actually show that evidence is faked and people are sentenced without due process, violating the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”. Because what the article showed were a lot of people who broke traffic laws, but none who were bribed or who sentenced people to fines without evidence.
I’m sure the only people getting ticketed are ones who have genuinely broken the law. There is no conflict of interest here at all.
If you have any proof on the contrary I’d like to hear it. Because the article didn’t provide any.
I live in Louisiana. Fenton is what’s known here as a speed trap town.
Except for the i-10, every major highway in LA has these. The trick is that the average speed limit on these highways is around 60 or 70, and then it drops to 30 or 40 for a mile stretch where cops are waiting for you just after the sign.
If you missed the sign or haven’t slowed down sufficiently by the time you reach it, they pull you over and write you a ticket for ~$600. I got one of these in 2018 for the latter reason.
It’s not just about obeying the speed limit. You can follow the speed limit to the letter and miss one sign on accident. It actually is a trap. It’s a main source of income for the small towns along the highways of LA.
The speed limit is often artificially low to entice people to speed though. Especially in towns like this that subsist off speeding fines.
Back in 2007 a group of UGA students drove the 285 loop around Atlanta at exactly over the posted speed limit (at the time 55mph). This caused traffic to back up for hours and the teens were arrested for blocking the flow of traffic.
And, from personal experience, driving on 285 at less than 70mph is absolutely terrifying. You’re liable to get hit by someone who is just moving with the flow of traffic. It’s substantially less safe to adhere to the posted speed limits.
So what is the expectation then, if not to speed?
The street design may be a massive problem, indeed. And I welcome any change towards more reasonable street design and more public transport. This part of the high way system seems to be rather busy - perfect for a high speed train connection.
But that’s not what the article criticizes and this misdirection is exactly what I find problematic about the article. Until better roads are designed “just break the law” doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
I think you missed my point.
The roads are designed with people travelling 75mph in mind. They easily support those speeds. There is no design problem.
There is a policy problem in that, despite the roads being designed to safely operate at 75mph+, the law has the limit set at 50mph. This creates an environment where you are encouraged to speed, as going the speed limit feels like moving at a crawl.
There is no safety requirement for setting the limit so low. It is entirely to allow the police to pull over people arbitrarily, as everyone is always in violation of the law.
My cat’s name is Fenton!
He does look like he would take peoples money
Gotta pay for that tux rental somehow
Hey, it’s the plot line to “nothing to lose”. Is there a coal fire under the courthouse?
*Nothing But Trouble
Thank you, I should google my references before posting them.
There was once a town that the state took its town charter away for the shitty way they pulled people over.
Louisiana needs to do the same.
People should literally stay away from this town, and drive around it. It’s simply unacceptable for any municipality to work or either exist this way. It’s better for everyone besides the 221 people living there not to ever visit or even passthrough the place
Another commentor said that it’s very difficult to drive around this town and it’ll add a lot of time to your commute. For people who have tight schedules (e.g. pick up or drop off children) it might not be possible to add an hour or more to their drive time.
Reminds me of Waldo Florida, back in the day.
Can you elaborate?
For about 20 years AAA designated Waldo as a speed trap because profit from tickets was a motivation for that city. They issued tickets based on quotas, so cops had to pull over an enough drivers to meet their quota. They also had something like a half dozen speed limits or something crazy like that set up to trick drivers.
Geez that’s insane
.
And here I thought that city that the Spiffing Brit did in Cities Skylines (and, to a lesser extent, Tropico) that subsisted entirely on toll tickets were just too dumb to be real. If that game allowed you to exist on fines, I suspect it’d be exactly like this place
PS - Invidious link to the vid - https://inv.tux.pizza/watch?v=gBe39Tn_75c
He also did a city that paid for itself using the worst possible mass transit system one could possibly imagine. IIRC, by the end of that map it took a person over 24 hours to go from their residential zone, over to their job no matter what it was, and that trip would cost them over $100 each way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xx0EJCOUyQ
Correction: a trip was over $9000!!! In fact it was over $9,000,000 apparently.
Second correction: the trip was extended to three days of time, but due to how time works in Cities Skylines 2, that’s 3 months of transit time on top of the 24 hours he already had set up.
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The mayor/judge:
Hey aren’t there a bunch of 2A, anti-government tyranny people in that area? Wouldn’t that be 220 people vs 1?
That 1 will be you, the traveler who got the ticket, not the mayor. They understand they need that money to exist and they aren’t the ones getting tickets. Lots of bridge troll towns scattered around the nation.
