The town of Addis has a new speed trap…$750k in speeding tickets issued in two weeks

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WEST BATON ROUGE PARISH — District 17 State Senator Caleb Kleinpeter is telling people not to pay tickets issued by the Ward 2 Constable’s Office in West Baton Rouge Parish, Kleinpeter told UWK in a phone call.

The current Ward 2 Constable is Ron Tetzel.

The Addis Police Department also posted a statement on Facebook about tickets from the Ward 2 Constable’s Office, explaining that the Addis and Bruly Police Departments do not issue those citations.

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Most of those citations are being issued near Lukeville Elementary in West Baton Rouge Parish. Multiple Facebook posts posted on the platform and sent directly to UWK show a man with a tripod, hat, and safety vest tracking cars within the Lukeville Elementary School Zone.

Kleinpeter said he began looking into complaints about the citations at the end of October and reached out to Sen. Stewart Cathey, R-Monroe, who told Kleinpeter to look into the newly passed Senate Bill 302, which allows drivers who receive tickets from an electronic speeding or red-light camera to appeal for a variety of reasons, including inclement weather or to claim that someone else was driving their car.

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From how Kleinpeter interpreted the law, he told Tetzel and the Justice of the Peace that what they were doing was outside the parameters of the law. Kleinpeter said he told Tetzel that he felt he was breaking the law and then reached out to Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who said Kleinpeter was correct in his interpretation.

“She (Murrill) spoke with the Justice of the Peace and the Constable (Tetzel) and told them as well to stop. The problem was, within two weeks, they started writing tickets again,” Kleinpeter said.

As many as 5,000 citations were written, with around 4,000 of them having been processed, according to Kleinpeter.

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“This is where a lot of people started getting tickets in the mail. And so 4,000 people got tickets; some people got multiple tickets. We even found out they were writing tickets on fall break whenever school wasn’t even in session,” Kleinpeter said

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Tetzel was also asked by Kleinpeter where he intended to attempt to hear these civil penalties in court because Addis Mayor, David Toups, told Kleinpeter that he was not going to hear the civil penalties made by Tetzel in his court.

“He (Tetzel) said, ‘no we have our own place.’ And I said, ‘where is that at?’ ‘He said ‘In Sugar Mill storage facility.’

“I said ‘so is there an appeal process?’ He said ‘no, I don’t think so.’ I said ‘you’re going to use a criminal offense to impose a civil fine but I’m not going to be able to appeal it in an actual criminal court,’” Kleinpeter said about his phone call with Tetzel.

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