Driving along River Drive, it might be awhile before you see speed cameras catching cars breaking the law. The speed cameras along the road are shut off, which means no money is coming in from them.
Revenue from those tickets has been dropping the past few months. From May through August of last year compared to this year, the numbers decrease from month to month.
The construction's affect on traffic tickets really starts in June. Last year, police handed out 158 tickets because of those cameras, compared to only 41 this year. In August of last year, 134 tickets were issued. This year, it was only 8.
Fewer tickets adds up to thousands of dollars Davenport doesn't have when they put together the next budget.
"The positive is the public is getting a reprieve for paying fines, that's the only good news there," Davenport Mayor Bill Gluba says, "It'll be back in operation, and I'm sure the revenues will go back to where they were."
But when they will be back up is unknown. Police say they'll have to use money to put in new cameras once the road is finished, but they have no idea when that might be.
Every day these cameras are off, is thousands of dollars the city doesn't have.
"Anytime you don't bring in revenue you have to get it from some other source so we certainly will be affected by it to some degree, but it won't bankrupt the city," Mayor Gluba says.
The mayor says any money missing could affect the police overtime budget down the road, but the city's finance director tells TV6 they don't count on that money and usually use conservative estimates for the expected camera revenue.
"Out of a total budget of $194 million, we can figure out how to handle it," Mayor Gluba say.
But having the cameras out presents a safety concern too.
"Keep in mind the whole purpose of this is to slow people down and protect the public safety," Gluba says.
The speed limit is 25 miles an hour, but drivers say hardly anyone is doing that now that the cameras are down.
"No way, they're doing at least 30-35mph, sometimes even 40," Carol Barry says, "No way are they going that slow, look at them yourself you can see they're not."
"When I have to cross the street, there's just cars just one right after another and another," Corina Campbell says, "They go more than 25 mph."
For now, extra patrols in the area will have to do the job the cameras can't.
"They do a lot of speeding and you wonder with the construction going on the officers would be watching a little bit closer so none of them get hurt," Barry says.
