Huntsville city leaders are delaying a proposal to equip garbage trucks with high-tech cameras to address public maintenance issues.
Huntsville city leaders are hitting a pause on a proposal to add high-tech cameras to garbage trucks for now. City officials say they’re holding off on a vote until the new fiscal year starts in October, so they’ll revisit the idea in September.
The city wants to partner with a company called City Detect. They install cameras with artificial intelligence on vehicles, in this case, Huntsville's 25 garbage trucks. Since those trucks cover every street in the city every day, leaders see it as a smart way to spot issues like potholes, graffiti, code violations, or illegal dumping.
The system would cost $337,000 a year and would automatically generate reports, so city crews could fix problems faster without needing extra staff driving around to look for them.
City Administrator John Hamilton said, “It makes it more efficient to have people do that and get that same capacity out of it because we would have to hire dozens and dozens of inspectors to go out and equipment and things. So it's going to allow our existing staff to be much more focused on what they do and only go to those places where we actually have an issue directly. It allows us to find those hazards more rapidly.”
The city says this is important because it will not generate additional travel and manpower by the city fleet to detect issues. They say it will help them identify and solve issues and violations much faster. In terms of privacy, the cameras will only be identifying issues in the public right-of-way.
The city council will reconsider the City Detect contract on Sept. 25.
