11 Drivers Nabbed for Speeding on Stretch of Rosemount Highway

If you’re thinking of speeding along a certain stretch ofDakota County Road 42 in Rosemount any time soon, you might want to back it off a little.

During a two-day period earlier this month – April 18 and 19 – authorities nabbed 11 drivers going faster than the 55 mph limit in a half-mile stretch of County Road 42 between South Robert Trail and Biscayne Avenue West.

The resulting citations were part of the state’s High Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic (HEAT) speed management program, a three-year project designed to improve roadway safety in Minnesota through education and heightened traffic enforcement.

“We are doing speed enforcement with the Minnesota State Patrol and the Dakota County Sheriff’s Department,” Rosemount Police Lt. Jewel Ericson said Thursday. “It runs off and on throughout the year, and over that period – April 18 and 19 – we would have had saturation going on in that area.”

The HEAT program provides a grant to law enforcement agencies to help with the saturation enforcement. The three-year effort began in July 2009.

The 11 drivers cited in the latest round of saturation enforcement in Rosemount – seven of them April 18 and another four April 19 – were exceeding the posted 55 mph limit by amounts ranging from 11 to 13 mph.

A notation on each of the April 18-19 cases says that each driver was speeding in a “special zone set by commissioner.” That means the 55 mph speed limit in the half-mile stretch between South Robert Trail and Biscayne Avenue West was specifically authorized by the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT), according to Dakota County traffic engineer Kristi Sebastian.

Sebastian said the “special zone” designation means that at some point, the city of Rosemount or Dakota County asked MnDOT to help with a “speed study” to determine the appropriate speed limit on the stretch of road.

The latest speeding cases, which are being handled by Rosemount City Attorney Dan Fluegel, were all filed with the court this week.

“I have no idea what the daily average is" of speeding citations in Rosemount, Fluegel said. “I wouldn’t say that’s a crazy high number of tickets in a given day.”

However, it’s the first time this month that so many speeding citations were issued for one particular stretch of road in Rosemount.