Several municipal police departments in Carbon County are up in arms after recent cuts in funding for aggressive driving enforcement.

Departments in Jim Thorpe, Nesquehoning, Weatherly and Beaver Meadows boroughs, and Kidder Township, have been informed they will no longer receive money to increase patrol on highly traveled area roads.According to Jim Thorpe Police Chief Joe Schatz, the borough received $9,000 since 2012 to target aggressive drivers on Route 903 in the borough.“We used that money for seven different waves of aggressive driving detail,” Schatz said. “Our officers spent 273 hours out there and wrote 429 citations.”Crashes in the borough went from 43 in 2012 to 32 in 2014.The decrease caused a problem for Jim Thorpe, however, as enforcement program coordinators took notice.Bob Schaeffer, project coordinator, said funding decisions are made each year based on statistics.“Our current funding only allows us to have 225 participating departments, and they were selected based on crash data value,” he explained. “I understand the frustration, but we don’t judge which area is safe or not. We can only determine who has a problem through our data.”The data is not in dispute, said Jim Thorpe Mayor Michael Sofranko, who admitted that crashes have decreased since the added enforcement started in 2012.“It seems like the officers are being punished for doing their jobs,” Sofranko said. “Even if they came back to us and said you can have 75 percent of what we gave you last year, that would be understandable. But to cut it out completely because our numbers have gone down is disappointing.”The aggressive driving enforcement is a part of the Pennsylvania Aggressive Driving Enforcement and Education Project and is funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.Overall, PennDOT pumped $2.5 million of federal funds into the most recent wave of the program.Each targeted roadway was identified as having a high incidence of aggressive driving related crashes, injuries and/or fatalities.The story is a similar one for the Weatherly, Nesquehoning, Beaver Meadows and Kidder departments.From 2012-14, crashes have decreased from 124 to 106 in Kidder, 5 to 2 in Beaver Meadows, 31 to 30 in Nesquehoning and 14 to 13 in Weatherly.In Kidder Township, the aggressive driver enforcement funds pay for overtime for officers to specifically patrol Route 903 and up to 1 mile onto a feeder road,” said Chief Matt Kuzma.From July 6 to Aug. 30 Kidder received $1,500 and patrolled 57 and a half hours. That led to 48 citations including 12 for speeding, two for improper turning, three for running a stop light, one DUI and one for improper lane changes. An additional 29 citations were for miscellaneous violations.”Like Jim Thorpe’s statistics, the numbers do not include citations written by the state police.“There were times the state police would come down and run radar for us,” Schatz said.Weatherly Police Department received $1,700 for its most recent wave of enforcement, from July 6-Aug. 30. Officers wrote 95 citations, including 49 for speeding along state Route 4010.One criminal arrest also came out of the patrol.“What the funding allowed me to do was put an officer out there for traffic control,” Chief Brian Markovchick. “Our guys are usually busy with criminal cases and we don’t always get to run speed.”For Markovchick, the program was definitely working.“In the years before we were in the program, there were some bad accidents on Hudsondale and Main streets,” he said.“I think we even had a fatal accident out there. Since we started these waves, our numbers have dropped drastically.”Have things improved to the point where additional patrol is unnecessary?“I don’t think we can say that,” Markovchick said.“I had a lady just the other night come and complain to me about speeding. Even though our data supposedly shows otherwise, there is still an issue.”Many of the Carbon departments losing funding, especially Jim Thorpe, are seeing increased traffic since the opening of the E-ZPass interchange on Route 903.Schatz said police will continue to patrol its target area, but with its current budget can only afford to have an officer dedicate about an hour per day for speeding enforcement.“We can’t replace that $9,000,” Sofranko said. “We would have to budget less money for our detective to do investigations, put less money into our drug enforcement and just pull funds from all these other places, which we don’t want to do.”More than traffic violations came out of the aggressive driving enforcement.In April, Jim Thorpe police stopped Jennifer Roxanne Coleman of Albrightsville.Coleman had 15 prepackaged bags of suspected crack cocaine, 10 bags of suspected heroin and several items of drug paraphernalia.Police also seized over $11,710 in cash from Coleman’s purse. She was arrested and consented to a blood test.“We have stopped people who are wanted for other reasons,” said Jim Thorpe Detective Lee Marzen.“This goes far beyond just slowing cars down, although that is the primary objective.”Schaeffer said they will continue to monitor the data and if more speed-related crashes are reported, funding could be restored to the departments for future waves.