The Editor's Desk

I succumbed to the mistake I’m most neurotic about in a recent editorial.

I wrote on Wednesday speculating that the CHP’s latest speeding enforcement drive coinciding with the governor’s budget cuts announcement was more of a show that they are a source of revenue of the state

A reader politely e-mailed me to inform me that the money from speeding tickets given by the CHP doesn’t go to the state — the money goes to county or city in which the driver is cited.

I’ve written here that one of my biggest concerns about writing editorials is presenting an opinion based on a factual foundation that proves to be incorrect, which is exactly what happened here. It should have occurred to me to think about the complex relationship between the state and county funding in California, but it did not.

I’ll have to make this right in an editorial next week. I do stand behind the rest of the editorial though, that a two-day publicized crackdown on speeders in the middle of the week is going to be unlikely to result in any sort of change in driver behavior on our stretch of Interstate 15.