LYNNWOOD, Wash. — Tens of thousands of people have paid millions of dollars in fines for driving through red lights in Lynnwood.
Those infractions were all caught on camera. A class-action lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle seeks millions of dollars in refunds.
Ian Jordan admits that he drove through the intersection of 196th Street Southwest and 36th in Lynnwood just as the light turned red.
However, the engineer from Mill Creek claims that the city is operating its red light cameras illegally, so he and thousands of others should get back the money that they were fined.
“If you want to say, ‘If you don’t want this ticket, don’t break the law,’ I’d say to Lynnwood, 'If you wanted to collect all that money, don’t break the law,’” Jordan said from his attorney’s office on Friday.
Jordan and his lawyer, Jay Carlson of Carlson Legal in Seattle, filed a tort claim last year against Lynnwood.
This week, they filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court.
They claim that state law requires municipalities operating red light camera systems to "post an annual report of the number of traffic accidents that occurred at each location" where a camera is located, plus "the number of notices of infraction issued for each camera."
According to Jordan and Carlson, Lynnwood didn't provide those numbers for 2 ½ years, beginning in 2013, and started posting them on the city’s website only after they filed their claim.
"Without communicating with us, they began slowly updating the data that they had not posted in years," Carlson told KIRO 7. "In my view, posting the data the way they did is an admission by the city that our tort claim was correct, that they were in violation of state law, and they knew they had to fix it, which is what they tried to do."
Now that the data is being posted, Carlson and Jordan estimate that more than 100,000 people were illegally issued tickets during that 2 ½-year period.
Their lawsuit seeks a reimbursement to drivers of more than $12 million.
"We've heard nothing from Lynnwood," Jordan said, "so we're going to continue to bring this to the next level to make sure that Lynnwood fixes the problem."
In an emailed statement, Julie Moore of the city of Lynnwood told KIRO 7 that the class-action lawsuit has been forwarded to the city’s attorney. Other than that, she said no one is able to comment "on the merits of the suit."
Cox Media Group
