Almost a year ago to the date, we brought you the story of a massive licensing fraud at the Traffic Department, which turned into a criminal investigation. The fraud had to do with counterfeit license stickers and was costing the council badly needed revenue. A year later the department is still plagued with alleged corruption and only recently, the beleaguered Manager of the department, Kevon Jenkins threatened to resign his position after he did the unthinkable. He blew the whistle on his own workers who he said were involved in the illicit licensing of vehicles. And so the recent stepping up by the department this week, by placing those annoying checkpoints during the rush hour, causing bottlenecks throughout the city and fatigue amongst motorists, has the public asking: is the City really gaining anything from the exercise. Jim McFadzean had his own set of questions about the checkpoints and laid them out for the Deputy Mayor.
Phillip Willoughby, Deputy Mayor
"I believe that a lot of vehicles are moving around the city out of the scope of the law; not being license; not being insured, maybe even stolen vehicles and these are the time for offenders to be traversing the city. While some might say it's creating a bottleneck, while some might say its hampering my movement to get to my office, I would just appeal to the residents to leave a bit earlier and just comply with the traffic personnel and the police traffic department. It's all within the safety of all motorist and also what I am looking at and this is solely from perspective of the Deputy Mayor now, I will try to push that all motorist under compel to use their seatbelts whilst driving. It is not for within the interior of the city but once you are on highways and so forth which is regulated by the government which is outside of the city limits, it is mandatory for all to be wearing seatbelts so I believe I will try to spearhead this initiative and this effort to encourage all motorists to be using their seatbelts."
Jim McFadzean
"Now this step up effort by the traffic department. Is its generating any type of revenue? has there been any significant increase in the ticketing process?"
Phillip Willoughby
"Well in a meeting earlier this week I met with the traffic staff and I was brief by Kevon Jenkins (Manager) and they have set some admirable targets and they are doing some comparative analysis and critiquing 2009 versus 2010 and they are doing pretty well. I would not get in the aspect of a nominal value per se for anyone to speculate on figures but they are performing quite well."
The Deputy Mayor says the concerns raised about the rush hour checkpoints do have merits and will warrant a review by the council.
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