The hottest ticket in Manteca will cost you $490.

The ticket?

It is for red light running caught by cutting edge camera radar technology at just five of the roughly 90 signalized intersections in Manteca.

The Manteca Police Department issued 916 red light tickets from Aug. 1through Aug. 23.

That’s up more than 50 percent from the first three weeks in July.

To put that in perspective:

*If the current pace continues, Manteca will end up issuing 15,860 red light tickets in 12 months.

*That’s 43.4 tickets per day or one red light ticket every hour.

*Prior to the red light cameras, police averaged 40 red light tickets a year that took at least 15 minutes for an officer to issue.

*The $490 fine — assuming 15,860 tickets are issued in a year’s time — represents $7,771,400 out of the collective pocketbooks of offenders.

Manteca will end up receiving about 20 percent of every $490 ticket. The rest goes to the court system and the State of California.

That is roughly $1.54 million Manteca will receive.

The contract with American Traffic System — the firm that installed the cameras and radar that send data and high resolution images to the police to determine if they meet the state’s threshold to issue a record light running ticket — is due a maximum of $873,600 a year.

The firm, once a police officer signs off after checking the data and comparing the driver’s image to make sure they correspond with the vehicle license issued to the registered owner, then mails the ticket.

Keep in mind the city won’t have to pay any shortfall in the ATS contract. That because California law dictates that if the city’s share of red light ticket fines in a year is less than the contracted price, ATS essentially writes off the ticket and the contractual shortfall is eliminated.

The city, regardless whether the $873,600 threshold is met in terms of annual ticket revenue, never dips into other revenue sources to make the contract whole. The bottom line, is the cameras do not cost the city a penny.

At the current pace, the city would end up generating about $700,000 a year after covering the ATS contract.

That money, based on a council decision, would go into a fund to hire additional manpower and fulfill other needs such as equipment for the traffic unit that currently has four officers and a sergeant.

Manteca Police Chief Stephen Schluer on Wednesday said the original thought was the department might clear enough to perhaps hire a community service officer.

The CSO would augment the traffic unit by focusing on non-moving traffic violations and assisting with the 1,000 plus accidents MPD handles annually to free up traffic enforcement officers.

If the trend holds, the department could consider additional personnel for the traffic unit such as a second CSO or a sixth officer.

Such hires would require a reasonable cushion in reserves for the red light fund as they are reoccurring costs for salary and benefits that can average $250,000 a year for an officer and less than half of that for a CSO.

The preference for Schluer is that the city eventually gets little or no money and that the revenue stream becomes so small, American Traffic Systems pulls the plug on the contract because it is no longer cost effective for them to service.

Such an outcome would mean Manteca has successfully slashed red light running that is the No. 1 contributing factor to intersection crashes that are the leading cause of serious injury and extensive property damage losses in vehicle collisions in the city.

The effectiveness of the red camera lights in terms of effective deployment of manpower can’t be overemphasized.

The department, in a typical year issues between 3,000 to 4,000 citations with less than a quarter for moving violations.

To match the effectiveness of the red light cameras in terms of moving violations issued in a year’s time, each traffic unit officer would need to issue in excess of 3,000 moving violation tickets.

Now it takes just a part of one officer’s work week to review and verify whether the red light camera evidence meets the legal threshold for a driver being issued a ticket.

The reason only 40 red light camera tickets were issued on an annual basis before was, as the police chief noted, “officers had to be in the right place at the right time.”

And even then it had to be safe for them to give chase and not imperil the safety of others.

It also eliminates the possibility the offending driver would opt to speed up and try to elude officers which would further diminish public safety.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com