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During the first January LaGrange City Council work session, LaGrange Police Chief Garrett Fiveash provided an update on plans to implement the countywide camera system funds but received a bit of pushback from the council.

SPLOST VI was approved by the voters and began at the start of the year and will go for six years. The first $4 million collected will go to paving and resurfacing Kia Blvd and bridge work in the area. The next $2 million is dedicated to go to a countywide camera system, which would be orchestrated by the chief law enforcement officers of West Point, LaGrange, Hogansville and and Troup County.

The chiefs and the sheriff are working together and figure where they want to put the cameras.

Fiveash explained that the money for the cameras will be split as SPLOST funds are typically split with LaGrange and the county getting 45 percent ($400,000) each and Hogansville and West Point getting 5 percent ($100,000) each. He said he and representatives from all the other three agencies have been discussing the different types of cameras.

“They’re basically two types. We have Flock cameras and we have Vigilant. They’re two different systems,” Fiveash said. “Flock is a hard mount stationary camera that’s in place all the time. It’s basically a fixed license plate reader that captures a still image.”

The Vigilant cameras can be moved and the sheriff’s office has had success with those, Fiveash said.

Fiveash said the city already has Flock cameras and the department is working to identify hot spots, where extra camera coverage is needed. Six intersections were identified where the cameras were needed, and it takes four cameras to cover an intersection. The annual licenses are $1,500 each, so with installation it’s around $72,000 to cover the intersections service over a five year service period.

Fiveash said they also wanted to spend a portion of LaGrange’s funding to add more Axon  car cameras to the city’s patrol cars and transition to using Axon on all their vehicles.

“The benefit with Axon is, each of those in-car cameras is basically a mobile license plate reader. So everywhere that patrol guard goes all day is reading every license plate that it passes. So of course, that basically incrementally increases our coverage,” Fiveash said.

“They’re $3,100 a piece,” Fiveash said. “That puts us right at $400,000 for what we need as immediately, the remainder of what we would have, as far as our appropriation.”

Councilman Mark Mitchell pushed back on the proposal a bit saying he thought the initial SPLOST request was to put cameras throughout the county, not in patrol vehicles.

“I’m going to totally support whatever the chiefs decide to do. I just want everybody to know that it’s not what I thought was in the SPLOST,” Mitchell said.

Fiveash said the in-car cameras are essentially mobile Flock cameras, so it gives them coverage at places where they wouldn’t place a stationary camera.

“The advantage of of both Flock and the and the in car cameras, is it’s running things through GCIC, through the crime Information computer. It’s looking for  things all the time. It’s not just capturing images,” Fiveash said.