The Virginia House Transportation Committee advanced multiple Senate bills related to traffic enforcement technology, towing regulations, and vehicle safety, while carrying over an autonomous vehicles bill to allow a legislative work group to expand and conduct deeper study. The most contentious item was SB 59, which would authorize local government employees and retired officers to certify photo speed and traffic light violation certificates after DCJS training, drawing sharp disagreement over whether the bill fundamentally changes defendants' rights to challenge citations in court.
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Delegate Ballard argued the bill 'dramatically changes the way we would handle these traffic infractions,' pressing repeatedly whether a defendant could cross-examine the certifying person in court as one can cross-examine a lab technician in a DUI case, and asking whether the Commonwealth could simply present a certificate as evidence with no one available to challenge. Senator Diggs repeatedly responded 'this does not change the current process at all' and 'this does not change the current process. It creates training.'
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“Typically in cases where I've represented folks for violations with a speed camera it requires the generally the out of state company to come into court and certify the violation the speed. So what we're doing here is we're saying someone local can certify to that violation in court to prove the charge which in my mind dramatically changes the way we would handle these traffic infractions.”
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Sign in to subscribeAll right, we're showing. You were showing your votes on the board behind us, but not on our screen. So go ahead. And it is being recorded if you look behind. Oh, and here we go. Now it's on the screens. Computers are definitely a little sleepy today. All right, the clerk will close the roll in the bill report 17 to 0. Chair Soul, does that complete your report? It does. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so much for your work this entire session. Mad Chair on your subcommittee. All right, just going back to one quick item that we did have. This outside of the subcommittee report was Senate Bill 670, patron by Senator Salem. I know there's been a tremendous amount of work on this bill this session. We do have the work group on autonomous vehicles that is also ongoing and believe that we are in a posture where we want to make sure that that work group has the opportunity to expand perhaps some of its membership and really dive in deeper this year before making some legislative recommendations. So I think at this time, the decision that we have before us is to…
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