Two deputies hired to beef up traffic enforcement are proving to be a good investment.
By AARON SHAROCKMAN
Published December 14, 2003
OLDSMAR - There's that one stretch of Tampa Road, right where it meets Curlew Road. Twelve lanes of asphalt narrow to six, with a clear view in every direction.
"It looks like a runway," says Pinellas County sheriff's Deputy Troy Desmarais.
And sometimes, motorists take off.
When they do, Desmarais is there to bring them back to earth, often with a ticket as an expensive reminder. It is a new role for the deputy, who was recently assigned to do full-time traffic control in Oldsmar. And it's already paying off for the city.
Desmarais recently sat on the median along a stretch of Tampa Road in an unmarked Crown Victoria searching for speeders. It was just east of where Curlew and Tampa roads join, the beginning of the "runway."
The posted speed limit is 45 mph but most motorists drive faster, even with a sheriff's deputy sitting visibly in the middle of the road. The cruiser's facing westbound, but the car's radar can target traffic in either direction.
Desmarais also has a handheld laser that can record the speed of a vehicle from long distances.
He sees a 1996 green Jeep coming toward him. He knows it's speeding.
"Too fast," he says as he turns on his radar.
The radar records the Jeep's traveling at 62 mph, 17 mph above the legal limit. Desmarais flips a switch and turns on his lights and sirens as the Jeep passes in the middle lane.
The driver, Debora Viego, 38, of Oldsmar, has her window down as she passes Desmarais' car.
She looks over.
"She knows," he says. "When you make eye contact, they know you got them."
Desmarais gives Viego, who admitted she was speeding but wanted a break, a $145 ticket.
In the next 21/2 hours, he stops seven more people, giving six tickets for an assortment of violations. Most were speeding, one made an illegal U-turn and another ran a stop sign.
Before lunch, Desmarais writes nearly $1,000 in fines.
"Some deputies can't hand them that big ticket," Desmarais said. "They can't see the look on their face when we give them that big fine. I look at it this way, I'm not out here to make your life hard. You're violating the law. You should have to pay what the law dictates."
A 19-year veteran, Desmarais was selected for this assignment from a pool of 10 applicants. In his training, Desmarais had to pass a strenuous series of tests, including judging vehicle speeds by eyesight. For that test, he sat alongside a road and had to identify the speed of 100 passing vehicles within 4 mph.
Miss one, and Desmarais would have failed.
Now, with Desmarais enforcing traffic laws in Oldsmar full time, the fines from the tickets he writes promise to boost city finances. That, however, is not the main reason the city has contracted with the Sheriff's Office to provide more traffic enforcement.
Year after year, traffic has been getting worse on Tampa Road as drivers search for the quickest shot to and from Tampa. Forest Lakes Boulevard, State Road 580 and Tampa Road have all become arteries into Hillsborough County.
Along the way sits Oldsmar, a quiet, quirky city that had dirt roads a decade ago. Now there's more traffic than on the Courtney Campbell Parkway and the gridlock rivals bottlenecks throughout Tampa Bay.
There's nearly as much complaining from city residents.
They condemn the congestion. And they resent the rule breakers.
That's why Oldsmar officials decided to pay the Sheriff's Office more to beef up traffic enforcement inside the city limits.
Desmarais is one half of a new $100,000-per-year traffic unit in the city, sent to stop law-breaking motorists. In two months Desmarais and his partner, Deputy Matthew Ingoglia, have ticketed more than 600 people, nearly tripling last year's citations in the city over the same time.
The thing is, the deputies don't even need to be picky.
"We don't have to search to find things to do," said Desmarais, who can tell a car's speed within a few miles an hour with a brief glance. "We can sit on Tampa Road all day, every day, and keep busy."
That is exactly what the city thought when it contracted the additional service. Mayor Jerry Beverland even said there would be enough rule breakers zipping across Oldsmar's streets to pay for the new traffic deputies in fine money.
That's what happened in Seminole, where two traffic deputies have written enough tickets to cover the costs of those positions, said Sgt. Darrell Herrick, who is in charge of community policing in the Sheriff's Office's North District Station.
Cities collect 56 percent of the revenue generated by each traffic ticket, while the state and Sheriff's Office split the rest.
That means to pay for Oldsmar's new program, Ingoglia and Desmarais would have to write about $180,000 worth of tickets in a year. In October, their first month on the job, the duo wrote nearly $40,000 worth of tickets. In November, they issued 252 citations, tallying $32,000 in fines.
That means the traffic unit could be halfway to $180,000 by Christmas.
"I never had any doubts that the deputy would pay for himself," Beverland said. "If you're going to drive in the city of Oldsmar, you're going to drive safe. And if you don't, you'll get a ticket. It will save your life and save somebody else's life."
In November, accidents in the city dropped sharply from the same month last year, Herrick said. There were 25 crashes reported last month compared to 57 in November 2002, a 56 percent decrease, according to sheriff's statistics. In October, deputies reported 58 accidents.
"Here's a place where there's going to be nothing but traffic problems, if there isn't anymore to control it," Desmarais said. "Whatever we can do to make the roads safer, that's the name of the game."
