As Hillsborough County’s camera citation programs continue pulling in millions of taxpayer and driver dollars, the county commission has moved to replace the volunteers who once heard citizen appeals with paid attorneys — and the man overseeing the change can’t quite explain why.

The county has hired five new hearing officers, all members of the Florida Bar, to take over appeals of red-light and school zone speed camera tickets from the volunteer special magistrates who previously served in that role. County documents put the price tag at roughly $22,500 a year, with hearing officers paid $250 for the first three hours of a session and $100 for every hour after that, capped at $500 per docket.

For a government that already collects real money off these programs — $10.3 million from school zone speed cameras and just over $2 million from red-light cameras since January 1 — adding a new paid layer to the appeals process is the kind of decision taxpayers deserve a straight answer on. They aren’t getting one.

Commission Chairman Ken Hagan declined repeated interview requests from Spectrum Bay News 9 to explain why commissioners approved the switch. Instead, the county sent Veteran Community Services Director Frank Strom, who manages the hearings but couldn’t say why the board made the call in the first place.

“I can’t answer why the Board of County Commissioners decided to do this,” Strom said. “I can only speculate that it was probably in the best interest of the citizens.” Pressed on why the county is now paying for a service it previously got for free, Strom deflected again: “I don’t know, you’d have to ask our county attorneys about that.” County attorneys, for their part, pointed to “the recruitment and retention of qualified individuals” — a justification that explains the mechanism but not the motive.

That vagueness matters more given the backstory. Thomas Santarlas, the special magistrate who had handled citation appeals since the program began, was quietly reassigned away from school zone cases back in February after — by his own account — dismissing several citations for lack of evidence. County officials insisted the move had nothing to do with his rulings. Strom, who signed off on the reassignment, said as much directly: “The decision was made based on the needs of the organization. It had nothing to do with his decisions.”

Santarlas isn’t convinced. “If you’re impartial and professional when you’re doing the red-light cameras, and I take the same approach to the school zones, how can there be a difference?” he said. He also noted that unpaid magistrates who aren’t part of the legal system may actually be better positioned to rule against the government that appointed them, since they have no professional relationship to protect: “They can be more impartial and look at things in a more even-toned way.”

That’s a point worth sitting with. A citizen appealing a camera ticket is, by definition, disputing a government revenue source. Whether the person hearing that dispute is a volunteer with nothing to lose or a paid contractor whose $500-per-docket check comes from the same county government defending the ticket is not a trivial distinction — it’s the whole ballgame for anyone who cares about due process standing up against a self-interested bureaucracy. Mustafa Ameen, an attorney and adjunct professor at Cooley Law School in Tampa, confirmed the standard both roles are supposed to meet: independence. “In both scenarios, the hearing officers and the magistrates are supposed to be independent, and they’re allowed to make their decisions,” he said.

Ameen’s broader read on the situation cuts to the heart of it: “There’s a lot of players involved in this, and no one wants to accept responsibility over it because it’s bad for publicity.” When a program generates over $12 million in less than nine months, and the people running it won’t explain a structural change to how citizens can fight back against it, “bad for publicity” may be underselling it.

The backlog itself points to a system straining under its own success. A surge in appeal requests earlier this year left more than 1,000 school zone speed camera cases piled up with a single magistrate handling them after Santarlas’s reassignment. “The amount of appeals was a surprise to us as well,” Strom said. If a revenue program is generating enough disputed tickets to overwhelm the appeals process, that’s arguably a signal about the program’s design — not just its staffing.

The county hasn’t said when the new hearing officers will actually start hearing cases; they were reportedly selected in July but only recently signed contracts and have yet to begin training. In the meantime, Santarlas says his docket sits open, and Hillsborough drivers waiting on appeals are left with more questions than the county commission has been willing to answer.

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