Ousted California county appointee allegedly tore down traffic meters worth over $20,000
A Northern California man’s recent ouster from his appointed position on a county commission came after he allegedly took it upon himself to remove tens of thousands of dollars worth of “devices” he noticed on traffic poles and deemed suspicious.
The devices turned out to be traffic flow meters installed by a consulting firm that has worked for years under contracts with El Dorado County.
Chris Cockrell, a Cameron Park resident who owns a bicycle shop in Shingle Springs, lost his position last week on the county’s Veterans Affairs Commission.
Supervisor George Turnboo, who appointed Cockrell to the four-year position in early 2021 despite community concerns about an incident involving him taking photos with a local Proud Boys group, placed an item on the agenda for the June 14 Board of Supervisors meeting to rescind the appointment.
Turnboo declined to comment on the reason he sought Cockrell’s removal. Cockrell, who resigned the day before the meeting, has not responded to a request for comment.
But the decision came a few weeks after Cockrell shared to social media his concerns about unauthorized “devices” affixed to traffic signals in the Cameron Park area, and then declared he would remove them.
Within a week, as many as eight such devices were removed by a Cameron Park resident, the county’s top transportation official told The Sacramento Bee.
In May 24 posts to Facebook and Instagram tagging Don Ashton, El Dorado County’s chief administrative officer, Cockrell shared a pair of photos showing an item that looks like a camera atop a traffic light, with an accompanying red box attached to the base of the pole.
Cockrell said he saw the equipment at the intersection of Cameron Park Drive and Oxford Road, near the town’s airport. He asked Ashton whether the items in the picture “appear to be an authorized device installed by someone with official capacity.”
Screenshots of comments beneath Cockrell’s post on Facebook, provided by two readers in separate emails, show that another user had commented, “I’m in if you all are about dismantling these awful things.” That person’s identity was not visible in the screenshots.
“In my professional opinion, I believe it is someone’s private device attached to my taxpayer payer (sic) funded traffic device,” Cockrell responded in a comment, according to the screenshots. “I will be checking it out shortly and probably removing … when I get there I’m taking it with me and they can come get it from me.”
Rafael Martinez, head of the El Dorado County Department of Transportation, said that between six and eight of the devices were removed in late May by a person not associated with his department or the consulting firm that had them installed. All were in the Cameron Park area, he said.
“A resident did take it upon themselves to remove them, and then cordially returned them to the Department of Transportation at a later date,” Martinez said. He did not identify the resident who did so.
Martinez said the devices, which cost between $4,000 and $6,000 apiece, do not include cameras.
“Because they do have a little contraption at the top of them that are microwave devices that pick up the vehicles’ presence, it looks like a camera,” he said. “One of the residents thought it was, and thought it was some sort of intrusion.”
Martinez said he was not aware of any damage to the devices upon their return. Nearly a month after the incident, he said he does not believe the traffic counters have been re-installed on traffic poles.
The devices in question are from a company called National Data & Survey Services, El Dorado County officials said in response to a Public Records Act request. They were installed under a contract with Kimley-Horn and Associates, a Sacramento-based engineering and design consulting firm.
Board of Supervisors agenda items show El Dorado County has worked with Kimley-Horn since at least 2008, contracting the firm numerous times for traffic assessment studies. In April, the county approved a $108,000, two-year contract for Kimley-Horn to consult in the creation of a “data-driven traffic safety plan” for the entire county.
Martinez said there isn’t a formal permitting process for traffic flow meters, but that county transportation officials do get a “heads-up of the devices that are being installed, so that our own maintenance crews don’t remove them and/or do anything to them.”
Martinez called the traffic flow devices common.
“They’re not privacy intrusions, they’re just to collect volume (data).”
Cockrell’s Facebook posts and the accompanying comments have since been either deleted or made private, but his initial post concerning the devices on the traffic pole remained available on his public Instagram page as of Tuesday.
El Dorado County in its Public Records Act response confirmed the county transportation department “has not historically required engineering firms or contractors to obtain encroachment permits for installing traffic counters in the county’s right of way.”
“There’s been an unwritten policy between the county, developers, and traffic engineering consultants that the data collected is not only used to analyze the transportation impacts of private development projects, but that the data will be shared with the County to assist us with our modeling and future projections as well,” the response continued.
“While we didn’t know the specific dates that the counters were going to be placed in the field, we were aware that counts were going to be collected in the area as a result of a forthcoming private project.”
In another Facebook post this month, viewed by a Sacramento Bee reporter before its removal, Cockrell shared a photo of the agenda item to remove him from the Veterans Affairs Commission. In its caption, Cockrell blamed “developers and the progressive party.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Ousted California county appointee allegedly tore down traffic meters worth over $20,000."
