Lookout, Vegas 02 Drivers...

[Guest Anonymous]

From our Daily Rag/Trash San Diego newspaper this A.M.:

Smog monitors may be over legal line

ASSOCIATED PRESS

April 3, 2002

LAS VEGAS: A Department of Motor Vehicles program intended to sniff out and photograph polluting vehicles might run afoul of a state law prohibiting the use of cameras for traffic enforcement.

The DMV set up a roadside vehicle emissions monitoring program on an Interstate 15 on-ramp in Las Vegas this week, using sensors to test the air around passing vehicles and cameras to capture license plate images.

Officials said registered owners of polluting vehicles will get letters instructing them to appear at the state's emissions lab for a smog check.

"We'd like to see the vehicle get repaired," Lloyd Nelson, the DMV's program manager for vehicle emissions, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Nelson characterized the program as educational but said vehicle registrations could be canceled if owners don't comply.

State Sens. Mark James, R-Las Vegas, and Joseph Neal, D-North Las Vegas, said the program violates at least the spirit of a 1999 law banning the use of cameras for traffic enforcement.

James wrote, and Neal backed, the law that prohibits the use of cameras to gather evidence for a traffic citation unless the camera is hand-held or installed in a law enforcement vehicle or facility.

"In an effort to do something good, we often end up doing something that results in more intrusion and more restrictions on our freedoms," James said. "We have to be careful in extending the hand of government into unmanned cameras that send us notices that we haven't complied with the law."

Deputy state Attorney General Kimberly Buchanan said the roadside DMV program does not violate state law.

"It's emissions compliance, which is not considered a traffic citation," Buchanan said. "It's not in the same category."

DMV spokesman Kevin Malone said the agency historically has not canceled the registration of polluting vehicles.

[Guest Anonymous]

Hopefully the smokeshow will obscure my licence plate!