Carmel Antonishin’s long weekend was going just fine until she opened her mailbox on Monday to find an unwanted surprise.

She says she usually only checks her community mailbox every couple of weeks or so and this time there were a few more letters waiting for her.

Distroscale

Five of them originated from the same address and all bore the same bad news: a handful of photo tickets on five separate dates in the month of July and a price tag of over $3,000 total that she says she now owes.

All of the tickets came from the same stretch of southbound road on Route 90, a now-former designated construction zone with a reduced speed limit of 60 km/h, down from 80 km/h, that was taken down last week.

“I feel incredibly stupid but then I’m thinking, ‘How could all these people be stupid?'” Antonishin said standing alongside about 40 protesters — many with tickets of their own — who lined a strip of Brookside Boulevard on Tuesday.

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Kelly Antonation held two more tickets she said her husband received in the last month. They both total around $1,300, or two mortgage payments for the family.

“This hurts us,” she said. “I’d like them to know how they’d expect us to come up with this. How are we supposed to pay this? I don’t have it.”

Amendments to the Highway Traffic Act in 2013 authorized double fines for those speeding through designated constriction zones, whether or not there are workers and equipment present and whether or not there is a reduction in the maximum speed in the DCZ.

Both women say there wasn’t proper signage in the area, a requirement from contractors/traffic authority as designated in the HTA, which states that multiple pieces of signage must be present, including a DCZ sign, a sign saying that fines are doubled and new maximum speed limits for the zones — all of which have to be set out in a certain order.

So why not just slow down?

Photo by Scott Billeck/Winnipeg Sun/Postm / SunMedia

“I’m sick and tired of hearing stuff like that because I expect it from the City of Winnipeg,” said Todd Dube, who set up the protest and who runs WiseUpWinnipeg, a Facebook group that advocates against photo enforcement. “I don’t want to hear any more dumb rhetoric about, ‘Well, just slow down if you don’t want a ticket.’ That bull—- ends. I don’t want to hear it ever again from anybody. You’ll never see this from any other city on the planet.”

Dube, who organized the protest, said enough is enough.

“The city needs to stop this abusive enforcement,” he said, holding up a picture dated July 22 and devoid of any signage in the DCZ in question.

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“I’m advising these people to not pay them. They ran this scheme here for eight weeks, and they only took it down on Thursday after a television report showed the abuses here.

“This represents the biggest ripoff that this so-called photo enforcement safety program has ever executed.”

The city, meanwhile, says while the roadway is within city limits, the construction work is not being carried out by the city but rather the RM of Rosser.

“When a municipality applies for a DCZ, they indicate their construction timeline, and we place the signage for the specified timeframe,” a city spokesperson said. “If work wraps up prior to the end of their timeline, or construction staging moves within the greater construction zone, the responsibility lays on the municipality or its delegate to advise us that signage is to be removed or moved ahead of schedule.”

The city said they removed the signage on Aug. 2 based on the original DCZ agreement.

sbilleck@postmedia.com

Twitter: @scottbilleck