Glendale has budgeted $1,000,000 a year to run nine speed safety cameras — about $111,000 per camera, per year, for five years. The largest single item is $605,000 paid to the private vendor that supplies the cameras and processes the citations. The City proposes to pay for it out of the General Fund. Every one of those numbers is in Table 1 of Glendale’s own Speed Safety System Impact Report, adopted by the City Council.
Where the money goes
The report breaks the annual cost into three lines. Vendor operational costs — described as the camera system, citation processing and citation appeals — come to $605,000. Salary and fringe benefits for City staff come to $320,000. Other City costs, listed as procurement, signage, training and power, come to $75,000. That is $1,000,000 a year, and 60.5% of it leaves the City for a contractor.
The staffing line buys one to two full-time employees, which the report says are needed for oversight, administration and coordination with law enforcement. So the recurring public cost of automated enforcement in Glendale is roughly two City salaries plus a contract more than twice their size.
Where the money comes from
The report is explicit: “To fund this initiative, staff is requesting funding through the General Fund.” The General Fund is the pot that also pays for parks, libraries and street repair. The programme starts as a claim on it, not as something that arrives paid for.
The report then says that under AB 645, “revenue generated from citations is expected to offset operational costs before being allocated to local traffic-calming measures.” That is the statutory order of operations: fines cover the programme first, and only what is left over goes to anything else. It is worth reading that sentence twice. The programme is designed to be repaid by the people it cites.
What that means in citations
AB 645 sets the fines: $50 for 11–15 mph over the posted limit, $100 for 16–25, $200 for 26 or more, and $500 at 100 mph or more. Low-income drivers are entitled to reductions of 50% or 80%, so a meaningful share of citations will be collected at less than face value.
Divide $1,000,000 by the $50 minimum and you get 20,000 citations a year — about 2,200 per camera, or six a day per camera, every day, simply to return the programme to zero. That is arithmetic on the City’s published budget and the statutory fine schedule, not a forecast, and the true figure depends on the mix of fine tiers and reductions. But it is the order of magnitude the budget implies.
The 18-month clause
The same report states that cameras “will be operational for no more than 18 months after installation, unless a significant reduction in speeding per the requirements of the assembly bill have been met,” and that if Glendale relocates a system, the seven locations that did not make the final nine “will serve as potential relocation sites.” The infrastructure is designed to move. A location that stops producing violations is a candidate for relocation, not removal.
Read it yourself
The cost table is on page 3 of the Impact Report, under FISCAL COST. The report was adopted by the Glendale City Council, and the Council approved the vendor contract on 16 December 2025. Both documents are linked below — we would rather you check the numbers than take ours.