The city of Roseville, California voted yesterday to pull the plug on its red light camera program. Nestor Inc, had been responsible for the city's photo ticketing efforts since September 2005 after it acquired the assets of Transol, an Australian ticketing company that went bankrupt. Although Transol managed to mail $443,300 worth of tickets in nine months, the city suggested that because of "problems with software" that not enough citations are being written under Nestor's ownership.

"The city has also redesigned three of the [red light camera] equipped intersections, requiring a reconfiguration of Nestor's equipment," Roseville Police Public Information Officer Dee Dee Gunther explained in a memo to the city council. "Nestor and city staff met and agreed that it was in the best interests of both parties to terminate the agreement.

In June, comments Roseville Police Captain Stan Lumsden made in the Sacramento Bee newspaper suggested that there was no longer a need for the cameras after the physical layout of the intersections was changed. He insisted that driver behavior had "improved" and therefore citations had dropped significantly.

Roseville Police explained their efforts to prevent the public from learning the full story in departmental comments found in a Chula Vista Police Department memo (view memo in a 39k PDF file). Roseville recommended that Chula Vista discourage citizens making California Public Records Act requests by providing non-responsive documents designed to generate huge bills for anyone seeking public information.

"The one annoyance are the people who have made it their mission to fight photo red light citations by making public records requests," Roseville Police wrote. "My recommendations is that you save every related document somewhere and when you get your first public records request you send them an avalanche of paper and charge them accordingly."

Like Transol before it, Nestor has been struggling financially and faces removal from the Nasdaq Capital Market on October 22 for failure to comply with the stock market rules. A copy of the Roseville termination agreement is available in a 161k PDF file at the source link below.