Jason Anderson was driving his Subaru Impreza down South Dunkirk Street in Aurora on a February afternoon when he saw the flash of a mobile speed enforcement camera go off on the side of the road.
Aware — and annoyed — that he’d been nabbed for exceeding the 35 mph speed limit, Anderson didn’t realize the monthslong legal quagmire in which he would soon be embroiled. It’s one that echoes an all-too-familiar battle pitting the .
When the 44-year-old computer repair specialist received his ticket in the mail, it said he had 30 days to pay it or challenge it. Through deft use of the artificial intelligence chatbot Claude, Anderson dug into state law. He found that in 2023, the state legislature had that stipulated that the response time given to motorists caught by speed cameras “not be less than forty-five days after the issuance date on the notice of the violation.”
With that, Anderson hit on a legal discrepancy that he felt obligated Aurora to void his $40 ticket. And not only his ticket.
“I’m not against safety,” he said, “but if you want everyone to follow the laws, you need to follow the laws, too. I’m really hoping they have to refund the fines to those that got a 30-day notice.”
Through a public records request this week, The Denver Post learned that Aurora had issued 26,268 speeding tickets to motorists since the city began enforcement through its automated photo safety program in late December. As of May 31, it had collected $627,000. Around 60% of violators had paid their tickets, the city said.
“If you have a program that’s going to make you millions over the next few years, you should be able to follow proper procedure,” Anderson said.
He noted that the city’s has a link to the very state law he’s holding up in his defense.
Anderson requested a hearing to dispute the ticket within the 30 days allotted. A magistrate commended Anderson for his gumshoe research into the matter — “You did a good job and you’re making the city work,” she told him during the April 30 appeal — but she refused to dismiss the ticket.
The city agreed with the magistrate, telling The Post this week that Aurora is a home-rule municipality, “meaning the city has the constitutionally protected right to make local decisions at the local level.”
“The 30-day timeline between issuance and due date on these fine-only, civil violations is an example of the city exercising said authority,” said Jennifer Soules, an Aurora spokeswoman.
That’s not how two sponsors of the 2023 bill see it.
Former state Rep. Leslie Herod, a Denver Democrat, said the 45-day response period was deliberately inserted in the law to give violators a reasonable amount of time to both receive and respond to the ticket.
“Forty-five days was put in there intentionally, and Aurora should follow the law,” she said.
Outgoing state Rep. Meg Froelich, an Englewood Democrat, said the legislature saw the use of speed camera systems as a matter of “statewide concern” that would give localities little discretion on enforcement.
The first paragraph of the bill says so — adding that the “enforcement of traffic laws through the use of automated vehicle identification systems … is an area in which uniform state standards are necessary.”
“We were trying to balance people’s civil liberties with the push for traffic safety and saving lives,” she said. “We would hope the municipalities would enforce it to the letter of the law.”
Lawmakers, Froelich said, wanted to make sure that people who might work in another location in today’s work-anywhere environment had adequate time to collect their mail and respond.
“Fifteen (extra) days may not seem like much to Aurora, but it may be for this guy,” she said.
The underpinnings of the dispute over Anderson’s speeding ticket have flared often in Colorado, where state lawmakers gave towns and cities the ability to enact . The problem that repeatedly arises is the conflicting interpretations of how the state or the cities wield their respective powers.
“There’s always been tension between state decisions and local sovereignty, and that won’t go away,” said Robert Preuhs, a political science professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. “If the driver wants to pursue this, it will come down to the courts.”
That’s where two recent prominent home-rule and state preemption cases landed.
Last year, six metro Denver cities sued Gov. Jared Polis over the enforcement of several housing laws that require municipalities to take steps to increase housing density. The plaintiff cities, including Aurora, claimed that the state laws encroached on their local home-rule authority to oversee land-use matters. The case is ongoing.
And in the waning days of 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court handed down a ruling forbidding cities from punishing lawbreakers beyond what state courts would allow for the same offense. The justices ruled that when a municipal ordinance and a state statute prohibit identical conduct, the municipal penalties for such conduct “may not exceed the corresponding state penalties for that conduct.”
Preuhs said it was not totally clear who had the legal advantage in the Aurora speeding ticket case. But if he had to bet, he would give the edge to Aurora.
“Given the civil nature of it and the power of cities to set speed limits and enforce them, it wouldn’t surprise me that they would have the power to set a reasonable time frame for a response to a ticket,” he said.
Questions about the terms and conditions of speeding tickets issued by radar-activated cameras will only increase as the technology proliferates. Local governments in at least 27 cities and towns in Colorado have approved automated speed camera enforcement.
The Colorado Department of Transportation‘s first speed cams on Interstate 25 north of metro Denver caught more than 4,000 drivers speeding between Mead and Berthoud in March. Denver expects to install its first fixed cameras along high-accident stretches of Alameda Avenue and Federal Boulevard later this year, adding to the four photo radar speed vans that police move around the city.
Anderson, who did pay his $40 fine after his appeal failed, doesn’t know what his next steps will be with Aurora.
Municipal leaders in the Weld County town of Kersey voted in January to refund thousands of dollars it overcharged drivers caught by its speed cameras, according to . While the situation in Aurora is different, Anderson could envision a class-action lawsuit arising from all of the drivers who paid their $40 fine but didn’t have enough time to formally lodge an appeal.
He to tell his story.
“I’m not going to stop,” he said. “There’s a lot more road to go down.”
