HAMMOND | The State Board of Accounts and the Indiana Supreme Court will be putting the new red light camera ordinance under the legal microscope.

State Board of Accounts supervisor Charles Pride said his office received a copy of the ordinance June 9 while he was en route to Evansville to attend the annual conference of Indiana's clerks and treasurers.

Cameras take digital photos of vehicles running red lights and their license plate numbers. Tickets are issued through the mail by the private company operating the system after a review by police. By ordinance, fines of $100 will be assessed and initially treated like parking tickets unless contested, when they become moving violations.

"We are just back from the conference," Pride said Monday. "The information will be given to our attorney to be researched, and it also will probably go before our three-member board before issuing our audit position on it. It's a first for us, and we want to make sure we do our homework on it."

Pride said he already knows something of the ordinance because of questions posed by Hammond City Clerk Robert Golec during a conference session. "One of the things we are questioning is that those cases will never go to court," Pride said. The city wants the violations to be treated as infractions like a parking ticket payable through the city clerk's office.

"It seems to us to be a moving violation," he said. "If you're going through a red light, you're operating a vehicle. That's one of the main things we're going to be looking at."

Golec on Monday said Pride questioned the ordinance's legality as did Mary DePrez, director and counsel of trial court technology for the Indiana Supreme Court. "She immediately wanted a copy to review with the Supreme Court," he said. "She did not think it was possible either. And it did not sit well with the BMV."

Golec said the Bureau of Motor Vehicles was not happy with the thought it would not have a way of tracking truckers who run red lights, paying only a $100 fine.

Golec also is troubled by an omission in the body of the ordinance.

"I still have not been able to find anywhere in the ordinance where (running a red light) is made a non-moving violation," he said.

"I'm going to let the legal people work all this out," Golec said of his many open questions.

Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. last week told a group of Hessville residents the city will be proceeding slowly, installing one light at time, the first likely at 165th Street and Hohman Avenue.

Police had identified six likely locations, three in Hessville. They are 169th Street and Kennedy Avenue; 173rd Street and Kennedy; 165th and Hohman; 165th and Columbia Avenue; Gostlin Avenue and Hohman; and 169th and Grand Avenue.