EAST LANSING -- On Graduation Day this past spring, Michigan State University graduate David Feenstra got a not-so-pleasant congratulations from East Lansing police.

"He kept following me, got real close, pulled me over, said, 'Do you know what you were doing?' We went through that whole spiel," Feenstra says of being pulled over.

The ticket was issued on W. Grand River Avenue in East Lansing heading east toward campus.

The speed limit -- just 25 miles an hour.

"25 doesn't seem right," Feenstra says. "You're going all the way from a 45 all the way to a 25, there's no break in between and the signs are posted in a weird spot. So you know that anyone going down here knows that it's not supposed to be 25."

MSU Professor Jacek Cholewicki wondered the same thing when he was pulled over: 25 miles an hour just seemed too slow for that stretch of road between Frandor and Michigan Avenue.

"If you really try to drive 25 miles an hour, other people will try to drive you off the road," Cholewicki says.

Turns out both the professor and David were right.

A News 10 investigation shows a 2005 traffic control order (TCO) from the Michigan State Police and Michigan Department of Transportation, stating the safest speed limit for Grand River between Frandor and Michigan is 35 miles an hour.

Public Act 85, passed in Michigan in 2006, states cities and towns should be using such TCO's to set their speed limits.

Dig a little deeper, and you'll learn the City of East Lansing sued against that order in 2005 and eventually lost -- even the State Supreme Court sided with MSP and MDOT, accepting a lower court's ruling those two agencies have the authority to set limits on state trunkways. Grand River Avenue, or M-43, is one of those.

Six years later, the signs have never changed.

"There is still enforcement of that improper, unofficial 25 mile-an-hour speed limit," says Lt. Gary Megge with MSP.

He helps issue those traffic control orders, using data of drivers' speeds and how residential a street is. And he contends a speed limit as low as 25 on that stretch of Grand River could actually make the road less safe.

"That tends to create a lot of problems," Megge says. "We have a large platoon of traffic; we have tailgating; people are tempted to pass in that three-lane section of road, which is definitely an unsafe move."

The irony of that, Megge says, is that many of the folks being pulled over along that stretch are actually driving at the safest speed.

It all begs two questions -- why has MDOT never replaced the signs? And why is the city enforcing an improper limit?

"If you can set the speed limit low enough, you can give lots of tickets to safe drivers, and you can make a lot of money doing that," theorizes Jim Walker, an advocate with the National Motorists Association.

"This is operated as a very predatory speed trap by the East Lansing city police."

Public records show East Lansing issues more than 4,000 speeding citations every year.

But the city argues Grand River not a speed trap. They're simply trying to keep their community safe.

"There's a heavy concentration of pedestrians in that area, and, as I think a lot of people recognize, not all of them are paying a lot of attention to the traffic," says city attorney Tom Yeadon, who helped represent the city in its failed 2005 court bid for more control over setting its speed limits.

As for any concerns the city is shirking the law by ignoring the TCO, Yeadon says not at all.

"We clearly don't have any authority to establish the speed limit signs," he notes. "We can only enforce the speed limit signs that are posted."

Yeadon's right. MDOT has that authority, and a spokesman tells News 10 while the agency could theoretically change the signs in a matter of hours, officials don't want to step on East Lansing's toes.

Some state lawmakers are hoping to avoid that confusion by requiring (instead of suggesting) cities and towns, as well as MDOT, to strictly follow traffic control orders in setting their limits. That bill is working its way through the state Senate.

David and Professor Cholewicki, by the way, appealed their tickets on the grounds the speed limit doesn't comply with the TCO. Both times an East Lansing judge ruled against them, saying the police were simply enforcing the signs that are posted.