Lance Sotelo was 25 years old when a driver ran a red light on The Plaza in January and hit him. On Monday, the city's Public Safety and Community Relations Committee took up the question of what Charlotte does about that — and what it does about the twelve other fatal crashes in 2025 where a motorist disregarded a traffic signal.
City staff briefed the committee on a legal path to restart Charlotte's red light camera program, which has been off the street since 2006. CDOT Deputy Director Charlie Jones walked through the data and the law. Debbie Smith, the department's engineering and operations assistant division manager, presented the Vision Zero framework — a national standard targeting zero traffic deaths — as the policy umbrella for a revived program.
No vote was taken. The committee agreed to keep talking.
What Charlotte's own data shows
Jones presented Charlotte's own record from the Safe Light program, the city's red light camera operation that ran from 1998 to 2006 across 24 signalized intersections. Angle crashes — the violent side-impact collisions that result when a car runs through an intersection into crossing traffic — decreased 37 percent across Safe Light intersections overall, and 60 percent on the specific camera approaches.
The national picture holds up. A 2025 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found a 20 percent reduction in all injury collisions and a 29 percent reduction in angle injury collisions at camera-equipped intersections. When Houston ended its program after Texas banned photographic enforcement in 2011, crashes at previously-monitored intersections rose 23 percent.
The proposed pilot would cover ten of Charlotte's more than 1,000 signalized intersections, targeting locations on what the city designates as its high injury network. Between 2020 and 2025, Charlotte's signalized intersections saw 63 fatal and serious injury collisions and 2,738 injury crashes. In 2025 alone, disregarded traffic signals — the specific offense cameras enforce — accounted for 8 percent of all fatal and serious injury collisions in the city.
Why the cameras went dark — and the legal path back
Charlotte shut the Safe Light program down in 2006, but not for the reasons often assumed. The issue wasn't vendor contracts — it was the North Carolina Constitution. Article 9, Section 7 requires that 90 percent of civil penalties go to the local school board, leaving cities only 10 percent to cover program operating costs. That math doesn't work for a camera program.
The legal opening Jones presented Monday comes from Session Law 2016-64, a piece of state legislation the NC Supreme Court upheld — a ruling Jones said changes what's available to Charlotte. The law allows an interlocal agreement under which the school board operates the program directly and the city bills for administration, effectively restructuring who holds the revenue. Greensboro is already using this framework to restart its own program.
Charlotte still has an ordinance on the books governing red light camera use — Jones noted it hasn't been changed since 1998.
The January crash, and what comes next
Worth noting: the committee hearing the case is itself recently reconstituted. Chair Danté Anderson, who represents District 1, leads a panel re-established in early 2026 to give public safety issues their own agenda and their own time — previously, safety topics competed for space in a larger combined committee. Monday's meeting was a full test of that model: nuisance property enforcement from the city attorney's office and CMPD's NEST unit, a security briefing from CATS Interim CEO Brent Cagle, and the red light camera presentation. The cameras drew the most discussion.
The committee set no timeline and took no action. Members asked about specific intersections, program costs, and legal structure. Staff had no final answers to those questions on Monday.
The city has had this conversation before and not finished it. The 2024 Supreme Court decision makes the legal argument more viable than it was. The 2025 fatality numbers make the policy argument harder to defer.
Neither Sotelo's family nor a date for the committee's next meeting appeared in Monday's record.