The Flagler Beach City Commission is scheduled Thursday to vote on a $158,000 contract to install surveillance cameras around town, in addition to the license plate cameras installed two years ago.
The start-up cost would be $109,859, the recurring, annual cost, without accounting for inflation or cost increases, would be $47,815. The network would be installed by a private company, Jacksonville-based Johnson Controls, which would train city staff on using the cameras, and store the data on its cloud-based system.
Except for a camera at a city property at North 4th Street and North Central Avenue, and based on a city proposal, the 30 cameras would be paired at each location, with each camera covering a 180-degree angle, and be concentrated on the south side of the city, including one at Veterans Park, one at City Hall, one at the city-owned parking lot by the Anchor restaurant, at Wickline Park, at the city library, and so on.
The Eagle Eye security cameras would be mounted on poles and powered by solar panels. They would record at a resolution of 4 megapixels, imaging at four frames per second. The company would retain the records for 30 days. (It isn’t clear whether that’s in line with state public record requirements: City Manager Dale Martin did not respond to a set of written questions about the proposal.) The cameras would be accessible through the web and on mobile phones by authorized users.
The cameras will also be accessible in real time by the sheriff’s Real Time Crime Center, which already taps into existing license plate reader cameras in the city, in Palm Coast and in the county, into surveillance camera systems run by Palm Coast in its parks and other public venues, and into the surveillance camera systems of public schools.
Talk of a surveillance system in Flagler Beach began after vandalism at Veterans Park a few years ago. Commission Chair Eric Cooley said the $109,000 was previously budgeted “and ended up being put in reserves until they got things together.”
“The cameras are designed to give dispatch, sheriff, and police eyes on any calls placed immediately,” Cooley said on Tuesday. “Cruisers have laptops that can pull cameras up all around the county in real time. These will be part of that system. Nothing new really. We are actually behind on this compared to Palm Coast and county cameras.”
Among the unanswered questions: who in the city will access the camera feeds, under what conditions, whether the 30-day retention period is in line with state record requirements–or city expectations–and whether the city has a policy controlling video surveillance.
For a city with a $15 million general fund budget, the expense represents 1 percent of that this year, less in future years, though local governments currently are scrambling to cut costs ahead of a feared sharp cut in revenue from property taxes, not add costs. A proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot would raise the homestead exemption to $150,000 next year, and to $250,000 the following year, with a mechanism to eliminate property taxes altogether in subsequent years. Smaller municipalities are expected to suffer more from the revenue loss than larger governments, should the amendment pass.
Video surveillance has become routine at all levels of government and in many cities across the country. Flagler Beach has a very low crime rate. When crimes do occur in the downtown core, city and sheriff’s detectives typically rely on a bounty of private video surveillance systems in homes and businesses to assist their investigations.
“With ever increasing downtown traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, at all times of day and night, the need is heightened, in my opinion,” City Commissioner Scott Spradley said in an email. “The anticipated completion date next year for the new Flagler Beach Pier will result in an even greater concentration of visitors, so I support the acquisition and installation of a video surveillance system. I do have questions that I will raise at this Thursday’s City Commission meeting about the single contract up for approval given there are no competing bids. But ultimately, I do agree that a video surveillance system meets a critical public safety need for the City and will support this project going forward.”
An administrative memo to the commission notes that the city’s IT coordinator, Daniel Impson, “solicited and reviewed several proposals,” though it does not appear to have been a formal bidding process. Two of the companies listed in the memo did not respond with information to the city. A third was limited to license plate readers. It isn’t clear why the city did not bid out the system.
Sheriff Rick Staly was supportive of the city’s initiative when asked today. “I’m going to guess that my team probably knows, they’ve probably been talking to my team,” Staly said. “We use the software that allows us to take all these different feeds from any type of system and populate it into the Real Time Crime Center, so regardless of what they do, as long as they allow us to accept the feed, we have the software that will accept it. That’s what we do in the school district, and even with private cameras.” The Sheriff’s Office offers private businesses or homes the option of opting into the system.
“I don’t see any difference with what the city of Palm Coast does,” the sheriff said. “Unfortunately, in today’s environment and the world we’re in, you have to do that. Even with the cameras, they still get vandalism at Holland Park and Ralph Carter Park. Now it helps us to determine what happened, and in some cases actually identify the suspect, so I don’t see anything nefarious to that. I think smart business, unfortunately.”
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