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Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, says that he and his Cache Valley constituents are tired of a speed trap in Mantua, population 741, at the southern end of Sardine Canyon.

So he introduced SB100 to prevent cities from keeping more than 25 percent of the fines from speeding tickets issued by their police. He makes no bones about why he is doing that. "It's called Mantua," Hillyard said.

"I've had a lot of my constituents complain about that [speed trap]. They say they're coming home at night, there's no one else on the road, and they are going 72 mph in what is posted as 60. They get pulled over for a ticket that costs a couple hundred dollars," Hillyard said.

A previous analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune showed that Mantua issued 1,710 tickets in fiscal 2013, for an average of 2.49 per residents living in town then — the highest such ratio in the state. It means the police department, then with a full-time chief and three part-time officers, wrote just under five tickets a day.

Hillyard says those tickets are not going to Mantua residents. "I'm sure that 99.9 percent of your money comes from these people who have no business in Mantua at all," he said. "They are just driving through there."

Police Chief Mike Johnson told the Tribune in 2014 that is his town is not a "speed trap" because that suggests "changing a speed limit prior to the area to catch people unaware. But we are seven miles into a speed zone that starts when people leave the freeway [in Brigham City] and continues all the way up" Sardine Canyon to Cache Valley.

"There's no trap here. And we've made it a policy to give people plenty of leeway on enforcement," he said.

KUTV reported last year that Mantua Police issued 2,185 tickets in fiscal year 2014. It said that helped the town bring in more than $221,000 in speeding fines, which makes up more than a third of the town's $649,000 revenue.

Hillyard said, "So I simply say in this bill that cities can write all the tickets that they want, but they can't keep more than 25 percent of the revenue generated for their own budget."

The senator adds that he's never been ticketed in the Mantua speed trap. "I've never been stopped because I'm aware of it," he said.