NEW SCOTLAND — After months of discussion, the Voorheesville School Board on July 6 unanimously approved an agreement with BusPatrol to take control of the outside safety of Voorheesville’s 32 school buses. 

Board members had been deliberating since at least November as to whether they should allow BusPatrol the opportunity to affix cameras to the outside of district buses to catch violators who pass a stopped bus with its stop arm extended and its red lights flashing. 

The law that made penalizing drivers possible says traffic approaching a bus from either direction must stop if the bus is at a standstill and is flashing its red lights. A first-time penalty for illegally passing a school bus is a $250 to $400 fine, 5 points on the driver’s license, and/or possibly 30 days in jail, according to the state.

In September, South Colonie became the first Albany County school district to sign with Bus Patrol. In April, according to BusPatrol, about 420 citations were generated in the South Colonie district, of which 45 were declined, a significant decline from the first month of the program being in effect. 

Between Nov. 28 and Dec. 28, the county issued 923 tickets in the South Colonie School District, generating $92,300 in revenue, which BusPatrol splits 60/40 in its favor with the county. 

The Guilderland Central School District rolled out its program in April, Corey Fenley, BusPatrol’s New York State program manager, told the Voorheesville board at its May meeting; in that month, 312 violations were captured by cameras on district school buses, with 43 being declined. In Bethlehem, 78 violations were caught and 13 declined. 

BusPatrol’s Rodney Lemieux was asked by board President Rachel Gilker at the May meeting if the company has seen a decline in citations issued the longer a program is in place.

“The first year is typically the highest,” Lemieux responded, “because you’re actually starting to measure the reality of the market.”

 Lemieux said the company typically sees a 30-percent decline in violations between the first and second year a program is in place, with numbers stabilizing in the third and fourth year. 

Board member Rob Samson wondered why Voorheesville couldn’t administer its own bus-safety program. The district has already outfitted some of its buses with security cameras, five as of November, he said. Albany County has to sign off on the ticket before BusPatrol mails it to violators, so why couldn’t those violators just be flagged by the district?” Samson asked.

“Why are tickets not able to be prosecuted,” he asked, “or are they not able to be prosecuted right now?” Samson said, and if there’s an instance where “we see somebody going through on our camera, is that not good enough to be prosecuted by the county or to have an invoice sent by the county.”

Samson was told by Adam Hornick, a former Bethlehem Police Commander who now oversees the school bus safety for the county, that the New York State law that made fining violators possible also made the penalty a civil citation, akin to EZ-Pass violations sent in the mail by the department of vehicles.

“If you’re looking to actually issue a citation to the operator, there’s one key component in that: You must prove he operated the vehicle,” Hornick explained. In order to do that, he said, “You either have to have a clear picture of the person or they have to admit that they are the person that was driving. Now, given those circumstances, that’s a tremendous strain potentially on law enforcement to do that, to get somebody to really admit to it, or to actually capture them and somehow be able to recognize them in the photo.”

Samson asked, if the way the law is written, it’s required that a f0r-profit third party has to be the one issuing the penalty. 

Hornick told him that wasn’t the case, but what was needed was to have in place the proper tools and authorizations that would allow the third party to access information like license-plate data to generate the citation, all of which requires having expensive infrastructure in place ahead of time.

Hornick said, “It’s kind of cost prohibitive for us to do it on our own, given the fiduciary cost of the equipment, and then the citation, the DMV contracts, the licensing, the mailing, all those things, you’re adding all those layers, which are a lot more layers of expenditures on the county’s part or the municipality’s part.”