Perhaps not surprisingly, the city council today approved a ban on hand-held cell phone use in school zones and authorized spending $144,000 to erect 2,623 signs in the 651 city school zones, according to a DMN article. (The money is expected to be generated from $200 fines for violating the law; simple math says police probably will initially feel some city-induced pressure to write 720 tickets to make sure the policy is budget-neutral. That’s about one violation per school zone.)
If you think about it, voting against this measure would have been like voting against mom and apple pie (I guess Chevrolet probably isn’t appropriate here anymore). The News article says Mayor Tom Leppert acknowledged research that indicates cellphone bans don’t really work and can even waste government resources; he said it’s worth giving the policy a chance and that the council may review the policy later to see if it’s working. (Too bad he didn’t follow that thought process before gutting the city’s Verified Alarm System policy a few months ago.)
Somehow, I don’t see any council members — now or in the future — willing to fall on their swords and vote out the policy. This is a policy that will never go away, no matter how effective or ineffective it eventually becomes — it will be just too politically charged to disappear. Anyway, the ban doesn’t include the wired-in Bluetooth phones or behind-the-ear models, just the hand-held ones.
