Albany High School, one of 20 school zones where the city operates automated speed cameras.Photo: UpstateNYer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Albany County has agreed to pay the City of Albany $6,801 to end a lawsuit over school-zone speeding tickets issued to county vehicles, WAMC reported on Nov. 10, citing court documents filed in late October. Under a settlement signed Oct. 16, the city will mark 122 school-zone camera tickets and two red-light camera tickets as paid. Neither government accepted liability, and the case was dismissed. City Treasurer Darius Shahinfar confirmed the deal in an email to WAMC, writing, “We have processed the check.”
The county sued the city in August over what was then a smaller set of citations. In a petition filed in state Supreme Court, Albany County challenged 98 tickets totaling $7,375 and asked a judge to overturn liability determinations and default notices, CBS6 reported at the time. The county alleged that three citations were not shown in the city’s records to have occurred in a school speed zone, that six were issued on dates when the associated school was not in session, and that 12 final default notices demanded $100 each, above what the county said state law allows. The filing also claimed the city had withdrawn a practice of voiding one in four tickets for recipients of multiple citations.
Shahinfar told CBS6 in August that the lawsuit left him “baffled” and that the county had been “treated like any other entity that received dozens of tickets.” He said he was surprised the county was choosing “to expend more taxpayer dollars on a lawsuit than the cost of the school zone speeding tickets incurred.” Court records described later by WAMC show a winding path to the settlement: an April 2025 offer from Shahinfar to void 25 percent of what were then 45 county tickets, a March 2026 offer to settle for $5,000, a county check for $3,675 that Shahinfar rejected, and a city demand of $7,375 for 98 outstanding tickets. Shahinfar argued in court papers that the one-in-four arrangement was “a discretionary settlement offer, not a legal entitlement.”
The city’s Safer Streets page says Albany operates automated speed cameras in 20 school zones, with a posted school-zone limit of 20 mph enforced on school days from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. A violation is a $50 civil penalty, the city says, with a $25 late fee if it is not paid by the due date, and the ticket goes to the registered owner of the vehicle. The program began in September 2024 under state legislation signed in 2023 that authorizes the cameras through 2028.
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