The Burnet Police Department will soon begin using a new ticketing system in an effort to reduce traffic stop times, protect against system outages, and streamline data entries done by the municipal court.

The new system, run by Texas-based Tyler Technologies, was approved by the City Council during a regular meeting on Tuesday, July 14, and was estimated to cost $12,640.

Burnet Police Chief Tony Hefferin told councilors that the system will replace the department’s current FLEX software, which requires officers to enter in redundant information during traffic stops, and regularly suffers system outages, causing problems for the municipal court.

“(With FLEX), it takes a lot of steps when our guys are writing citations, which causes them to be sitting in the car going through those steps at any given time,” he said during the meeting. “Also, the interface that operates between FLEX and the court’s technology (has caused the court) to go in on almost every single citation and enter the data from FLEX to their system.”

Burnet Municipal Court Administrator Heather Sutton added that a recent system outage, lasting May 5-June 12, forced the court to spend anywhere from four to eight hours a week on manual citation verification.

Chief Hefferin explained that the new system would utilize a mobile app that can scan licenses and registrations, automatically fill out citation details, and allow the municipal court to easily move citation data into their systems without needing to manually enter it.

“It would give us the ability to use an app with our city-issued cell phones to scan driver’s licenses and scan registration stickers,” he said. “It helps us with fewer errors and it helps us with manual verification. (The municipal courts would use) a click-and-move versus an actual data entry.”

Hefferin added that the new system could reduce the department’s current average traffic stop time from 5-10 minutes to under 3 minutes.

caden@thepicayune.com