Just because a cash cow milks well, you don’t milk it four times a day.
That’s a misquote of a western proverb about the dangers of squeezing taxpayers too hard, but it can apply to Alberta Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette’s vow not to tack a $15 provincial fee onto municipal photo radar tickets.
Ideologically, he’s opposed to using photo radar as a source of revenue for towns and cities, over and above their use in promoting public safety. That’s not to say he opposes his own government doing just that. What else would you call traffic fines of $172 and up for driving while applying makeup? It’s just that he opposes anybody other than the province doing it.
What would you call a $15 fee for typing a licence plate into a database and then pressing a button? Simple cost recovery? Really?
Alberta municipalities are angry that the province will begin charging cities and towns $15 for every licence plate search that comes up with a photo radar or red light camera violation. They want the fee to be a surcharge on top of the fine on the ticket.
Ouellette nixed that notion — and fast. He did have to backpedal a bit after the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association published comments he made that a reasonable person could take to mean that he feels cities should just raise their municipal tax rates to cover the loss in revenue of $15 for every ticket they issue.
But Alberta taxpayers have short memories and Ouellette is back in the charge against cash cows.
Technically, the $15 fee isn’t creating another cow. Rather, it’s just skimming the cream from someone else’s cow.
There is no way that it costs $15 to run a licence plate check. In all probability, the real cost is probably less than a dime.
Anyone with any experience managing a database knows that the purpose of having a database is to make information retrieval practically free. Type in a number, hit Enter, send the result electronically to the people who need to know. The most expensive part of the whole process is the time it takes to type six (and these days, seven) digits into the proper search cell. Remember, this is a database the province keeps anyway, as it’s list of registered owners of cars. You’re not adding any cost to identify the owners of cars caught speeding, other than computer time, which on a per-unit basis is exceedingly small.
Charging $15 a unit is, frankly, revenue skimming that only a government could legally get away with.
So it is disingenuous — make that hypocritical — for Ouellette to scorn municipalities for raising millions of dollars a year in photo radar fines when he intends to take his full cut of their revenue for the province, at very little cost to his department.
Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel hit the nail on the head on this issue. He rightly noted that the province has all kinds of revenue streams that could be called cash cows (try gambling for a start, and move to alcohol and tobacco). This revenue is used to fund the business of government.
Similarly, traffic fines are used by municipalities to fund their services. What’s the difference? The difference is that Ouellette is ideologically opposed to it.
This column suggested earlier that doing these searches could be contracted out to a non-profit at far less than $15 a pop. Make it a $10 surcharge and the fundraiser would be wildly successful. In fact, people caught on camera and ticketed might be less ticked off by them, if they could be told that part of the fine will be automatically sent to, say, their regional community foundation.
But Ouellette is not being honest with municipalities or us while he does exactly what he scorns municipalities for doing: taking too much revenue from a program supposedly dedicated to public safety.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.