ST. CHARLES, Mo. – The City of St. Charles has recently touted a plan to get citizens to photograph people with expired temporary vehicle tags and send them to city hall. St. Charles has cited approximately 1,500 people as a result.

Mayor Dan Borgmeyer is now lauding a new program to address an issue creating an ever-growing danger to citizens: speeding through neighborhoods.

Residents are fed up with drivers putting their lives and the lives of their children at risk, the mayor said.

Borgmeyer said city police have issued hundreds of citations in what he calls a zero-tolerance approach to speeders.

“I went to the municipal courts and looked at the ticketing. It used to be in the 25-mile zone, you’d see people going 40, 45 (miles per hour). Now, they’re going 55 and 60 in residential areas in 25, so we had to crack down on that,” he said. “So we started a program June 1 called zero tolerance.”

The crackdown is also targeting people speeding in golf carts. Children driving those vehicles are not escaping the net of law enforcement.

“We had a lot of 13- and 14-year-old kids and younger driving golf carts and had a serious accident on the Katy Trail where they hit a woman. And now we got kids on motorized scooters all over town,” Borgmeyer said. “The citation is issued to the child, but it goes back to the owner of the car or the parents.”

The mayor believes the word is getting out about the consequences of speeding on St. Charles streets. He said speeding and temp tags are two of the biggest complaints they’re getting from citizens. But the matter of speeding is critical.

“We just needed to increase citizen awareness about the dangers involved. We got a lot of kids on the streets and stuff; and the other side for the city, it’s a liability standpoint,” Borgmeyer said. “If we just start allowing people to speed and don’t do anything about it and someone gets injured or killed, God forbid, and now it comes back on the city, those are huge lawsuits. We don’t want that.”