Suffolk Owes Your Fleet Money. The Claim Window Closes December 8.
A court authorized settlement would refund the 30 dollar fee Suffolk added to red light camera tickets since 2013. Businesses that paid it have until December 8.
By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·
Every red light camera ticket issued in Suffolk County since April 2013 carried a 30 dollar administrative fee stacked on top of the fine. A class action says the county was not entitled to charge it, and a court authorized settlement notice now sets out how the money comes back. The claim window closes on December 8.
The case is McGrath v. Suffolk County, Index No. 608155/2016, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Suffolk County. The defendants are the county and the Suffolk County Traffic and Parking Violations Agency, and they deny the allegation and deny wrongdoing. If the court grants final approval, they will pay up to 45 million dollars in cash to class members who file valid claims, with administration costs, attorneys' fees and a class representative award paid separately on top of that.
The word in the notice is entities
The settlement class is defined as all persons or entities who paid a 30 dollar administrative fee to the county defendants for a red light camera violation between April 1, 2013 and the present. Entities is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it is the reason this belongs on a business owner's desk rather than in a household's mail pile.
A camera ticket is not written against a driver. It is written against the registered owner of the vehicle. For a company car, a delivery van, a box truck or a service pickup, the registered owner is the company. The notice went to the company address, the fine and the fee were paid out of the company account, and no employee ever saw either. A contractor running eight vehicles through Suffolk intersections since 2013 may have paid that fee more times than anyone in the office remembers, and each one is a separate claim.
The payment is up to 36 dollars for each administrative fee paid, which is the 30 dollars plus interest. That figure can be reduced proportionally if valid claims across the class exceed the 45 million dollar cap, so the actual per fee amount will not be known until the claims are counted. A fleet with two dozen historic tickets is looking at a few hundred dollars either way. That is real money for the size of the effort, and it is money the business already spent.
Three dates, and one of them is a trap
Claim forms must be submitted online, or mailed and postmarked, no later than Tuesday, December 8, 2026. That is also the day of the final approval hearing, which the court will hold at 10 a.m. at 1 Court Street in Riverhead.
The earlier date is Monday, November 9. That is the deadline both to opt out of the settlement and to file an objection to it. Opting out preserves the right to sue the county separately and forfeits any payment from the settlement. For a business with a handful of tickets there is no obvious reason to take that route, but the choice closes a month before the claim deadline does, which is easy to miss when only the December date gets repeated.
The third thing to note is what happens by default. The notice is explicit that a class member who does nothing receives nothing and still gives up the right to sue the county over the claims the settlement resolves. Inaction is not neutral here. It is a release signed by silence.
Claims are handled by Kroll Settlement Administration, and the court has authorized a single official website for the case at suffolkredlightsettlement.com. Anything else that arrives by email or text offering to file on your behalf for a cut is not part of the court process.
What the case alleges, and what it does not decide
The court authorized notice describes the claim narrowly. It says the suit alleges that from April 1, 2013 to the present the county defendants imposed an unlawful 30 dollar administrative fee on top of the fine for each red light camera violation. The defendants deny the merit of that allegation and deny any wrongdoing, and the settlement resolves the dispute without a ruling on it. The court still has to decide whether to approve the deal at all, which is what the December 8 hearing is for.
The structural lesson survives whichever way that goes. A fee small enough that nobody fights it one ticket at a time, applied across a countywide camera program for more than a decade, adds up to a figure with eight digits in front of the decimal. Businesses pay municipal fee lines the same way, in 20 and 30 dollar increments attached to permits, licenses, inspections and violations, and almost nobody reads them. This one is worth reading because somebody else already did the work of questioning it.
What it means for members
Pull your accounts payable history back to April 2013 and search it for payments to the Suffolk County Traffic and Parking Violations Agency. Every 30 dollar administrative fee you find is one claim, and the filing is a form rather than a legal proceeding. Put the November 9 objection and opt out date and the December 8 claim deadline in the calendar today, assign it to whoever handles your vehicle registrations, and treat it as a collections task rather than a legal one.
If your vehicles are titled to a leasing company rather than to the business, check who actually paid the fee before you file, because the class follows the payer.
