Delegate David Moon wants to spend stop-arm school bus camera citation revenue, but there is no indication there is any revenue.

Montgomery County Delegation

Bill Hearing

December 15, 2021

MC 3-22 Montgomery County – Speed and School Bus Monitoring Systems

Janis Zink Sartucci - Parents’ Coalition of Montgomery County, MD

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on MC 03-22. This bill seeks to use the revenue from school bus stop arm camera citations to build medians on busy roads.

Are these medians needed at this locations? If so, what revenue?

The public used to be able to track the revenue from the stop arm camera citations on the MCPS Funding Accountability and Transparency Reporting Database. But MCPS stopped reporting any revenue on that database in October of 2020. Not one single thing has been posted on that database since then. Fiscal Year 2022 isn’t even an option on the drop down menu. As you recall, the legislature changed the reporting requirement in2019, and MCPS took that opportunity to stop posting to that database all together. We know there is a rumor that MCPS still “voluntarily” posts to the database, stop spreading the rumor and stick to the facts. The database is dead.

On March 7, 2019, I spoke to the House Ways and Means Committee and documented that stop arm school bus camera citation revenue could not be tracked.

In December of 2019, Montgomery County’s Office of the CountyExecutive, Office of Internal Audit released a Financial ComplianceReview of Bus Patrol America, LLC, the vendor handling the stop arm citations. Here’s a copy of that financial review. [Delegation shown blank piece of paper.]

Yes, the entire document has been redacted and withheld for two years. Who knows if there is any revenue from citations? We have filed a Maryland Public Information Act request for this report to be made public, but 46 days later nothing has been released. We have requested the the assistance of the Maryland PIA Ombudsman.

Montgomery County Internal Audit (MCIA) conducted a financial compliance review of BusPatrol for transactions occurring from July 1, 2016 through August 31, 2019, with the following objectives: 

1. Obtain supporting documentation and verify the validity of charges billed to the County; 

2. Calculate the total amount of payments made to BusPatrol and compare to the “Cost of Investment” reconciliation prepared by BusPatrol defined in the Agreement;

3. Confirm if (or when anticipated) the break-even point would be reached; 

4. Perform analysis of any payments owed by the County to BusPatrol. This report summarizes the review performed. 

THIS REPORT CONTAINS PROPRIETARY INFORMATION AND IS CONSIDERED CONFIDENTIAL. THE REPORT IS NOT AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC .

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/exec/internal_audit.html

This bill seeks to spend stop arm school bus camera revenue that can’t be documented and may not even exist.

This bill doesn’t address that school bus stops on multi-lane roads are inherently dangerous. The Federal Highway Administration has said that school systems should minimize or avoid multi-lane roads where pedestrians are most at risk of injury.

Finally, what happened to stop arm school bus cameras as part of a public safety campaign around Montgomery County school buses? What happened to that? Has even $1 of citation revenue been used to do anything to help keep County children safe around school buses?