October 10, 2023 — Meeting Transcript

All right. Well, welcome everyone to our October 10 board meeting. And will the city clerk call the roll? Alderman Berkowitz?

Here. Alderman McAndrew? Here. Alderwoman Buse? Here. Aldermen Gary Feder?

Here. Alderman McAndrew? Here. Alderwoman Buse? Here. Aldermen Fader?

Here.

Aldeman Rick Hummell?

Aldeman Hummel?

Here.

Mayor Harris? Here. City Manager David Gipson?

Mayor Harris? Here. City Manager Gibson?

Here.

City Attorney

O'Keefe?

Here.

Thank you. Very good. Now's the time on our agenda where I will call for public requests and petitions. If there's anybody in our audience here or online that would like to talk to us about something that's not on our agenda tonight, if you could raise your hand or let us know. Okay, seeing none, we can move on. Just so everyone knows, in case you were had come to hear the chief's presentation on flock cameras. We're gonna shift that to the last part of our agenda. And we're gonna first do with the CUP for 515 Central, Mr. Steve. And oh, I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication.

All right, this is a public hearing and subsequent resolution to consider granting a conditional use permit to Ann and Kevin Davis, owners of 515 South Central Avenue, to allow for the construction of a rear addition to a single family home containing a 953 square foot attached accessory dwelling unit. The property has a zoning designation of R2, single family dwelling district. The plan commission and architectural review board considered the applications and associated architectural and site plans for the project on October 2nd, 2023 and recommended approval of the CUP and improve the architectural and site plans. An accessory dwelling unit or ADU is a type of accessory structure, either attached or detached, which provides complete independent living facilities for one or more persons, including permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking, and sanitation, and is located on the same site as the principal residence. Again, in this particular case, it is attached. The proposed ADU is located on the basement level of the single-family home. The area is connected to the main living space, but can also be accessed directly from an exterior door. The occupant of the ADU will work on the grounds of the property, which conforms with the code requirements. The plan commission voted five to zero to recommend approval of the CUP with the following conditions. First, all conditions of chapter 405, article two, section 405.330 shall be adhered to. And secondly, the applicant shall record a deed restriction pursuant to item three under criteria for review with the St. Louis County Recorder of Deeds Office and submit proof of the required deed restriction to the city prior to the issuance of a building permit. Staff recommends that the Board of Aldermen conduct a public hearing and consider approving the resolution granting a conditional use permit for nine for a 953 square foot attached ADU for 415 South Central Avenue

okay thank you uh first I will open this up for discussion and any discussion from members of our audience or online attendees would anyone here like to address the board about this topic the resident here okay you're the resident okay great um would you like to address us at all or we just okay okay very good yes would you like to yeah make sure the mic is on and also tell us your name and address

um my name is steve singer and my wife and i live at 509 south central where the adjacent property to the property that's being discussed tonight. First, I want to say that I greatly appreciate the the job that you all do having served on the school board with a couple of you and various commissions with others of you, I know how hardworking you are, and how you carefully review the issues before and but and let me say that speaking that we don't really care who lives next door to us. The issue for us and I believe for the other neighbors is an issue relating to enforcement of city ordinances. We have lived next to this house for the last two years, which has become basically a dump site. And there have been repeated actions brought in housing court on this. And in two cases, one, the conversation with the prosecuting attorney and the other very recent conversation with the new judge, both of them said that they basically did not have the authority to enforce properly Clayton ordinances. So my comment to you tonight is, I assume you're probably going to approve this, but the issue that you need to address is what do you do when you have a citizen who doesn't seem to want to comply with Clayton ordinances, building ordinances? And the current system is just not designed to address that. And I think, obviously I don't expect you to resolve that tonight, but I think it needs to become a study item for you as you explore what other cities have done, what other municipalities in St. Louis, Missouri, throughout the country are doing. Because what we have right now is not working. And it does not protect the other homeowners. And, you know, it's preposterous that the prosecuting attorney and the judge would make a comment that they simply don't have the authority to enforce the ordinances you issue. So thank you. That's my comment. And I wish you all well.

Thank you very much. Yes. Would you like to come up? Yeah. Come on up and Just for the recording, go ahead and state your name. Absolutely.

Hi, Lauren Davis. We're the ones petitioning for everything. So part of the reason that unfortunately, well, first off, let me start by saying I've lived in Clayton most of my life. I grew up in Davis Place. I previously, until we sold our house after the first of the year, owned a house on Maryland in Old Town for 12 years. I currently reside in Davis Place. I have no desire for the property to be derelict in any way. The matter that he referenced was due to the condition of the house being shabby and inadequate ground cover for grass in the front yard. We don't have an irrigation system, and at present, the house is a shell, and without approving the... sorry, the architecture review and the site plan, which was submitted back in June after several meetings with the city addressing this issue. We can't get grass to grow there, and we can't make the house nicer without being able to do the addition. There's nothing I can do without water and irrigation and in the summer to make grass grow. so at this point the committee has approved the architectural review and the site plan um it's not that we just don't want to make the property nice in fact we're taking what was a crumbling house and turning it into a much nicer much larger property worth three times what it would have been worth and what we paid for it so it will be extremely nice I apologize. My husband got stuck in a meeting, so the little one had to come with us. It will be extremely nice when it's complete. Unfortunately, this delayed us another six weeks having to do this application so that our live-in nanny can live in the lower level with her son who has cerebral palsy. They're both from Ukraine and they live with us. She is employed by us as a nanny and lives with us, and we care for her and her son and are helping them file for asylum. I hope you'll approve this. It's not that the city hasn't enforced it. We were at the housing court meeting where they tabled it to November because the judge himself agreed that there's nothing that could be done absent the approval of the site plan and the architecture review board, because when we can begin working on the property, which is gonna require significant excavation and things like that, that would negate any planting of grass now, there's really just nothing that can be done. Okay,

thank you very much. All right. I'm just going to open it up for discussion among the board, and I'll go in order of seniority. Any comments or questions, Alderman Berkowitz?

I do not have any questions.

Alderman Kandrew, do you want to make any comment about the architecture review board meeting?

I do not. As all the plans were approved, yes. I do agree that it's been a frustrating couple of years for the neighbors. And I think it is something we have to look at. I think we all are aware that the Ferguson reforms had some unintended consequences here. But I am hopeful that now that some of the, you know, certainly that the plan commission approved all the additions and the big renovation that will happen. So I am very hopeful that... you know, after this evening, um, depending on, you know, what happens with the ADU, um, that, you know, I think it will be important. I hope that the, you know, the renovation continues, that the addition happens, um, that this family can certainly improve the property. Um, and then I'm hopeful that the neighborhood will, um, you know, see all these wonderful improvements and I'm just, you know, Um, we can certainly move forward. I think that would certainly be everybody's goal here. Um, so, uh, but in terms of the, you know, I believe that the requirements have been fulfilled, you know, as David mentioned in the city manager's report, um, for this ADU. So I would be, um, supportive of approving it this evening. Thank you.

All the women abuse.

Thanks. Uh, I think as far as the ADU, uh, compliance and approval of the requirements. That all seems fairly straightforward. I am concerned, I guess, just ongoing, we all have a responsibility to our neighbors to comply with Clayton standards and Clayton code. And I would hope, and I don't know if the petitioner wants to address this, that there's full intention to be considerate and be compliant and respectful of the code. It bothers me when we come to the point of can we enforce it versus we all want to live by what we've agreed to as a community. So that's a little bit separate from the specific question tonight of approving the ADU, but I think it might be something that'd be helpful to hear.

Sure. Sorry, I thought I made that clear in the previous response. Like I said, we lived at our previous address for 13 years in Old Town. We had nothing but nice things to say about the neighbors and they about us. We had no issues. This is our permanent house. It has taken us significantly longer than we ever anticipated, both by process and just the way things have played out. Like I said, we filed the paperwork initially with the architectural review and the site plan back in June. And we didn't expect that here we would be in mid-October still dealing with this. So we're currently living in a rental because we already sold our old house. This is the house that we intend to build as a forever house. Our children go to one child goes to Merrimack. The other one will go to Merrimack so I mean this is something that we have. absolute full intention of building to be our forever home i think as part of the guidelines that we've already agreed to with the approval of all the entire packet with all the criteria was a performance bond saying that it would be completed in a timely manner we've already submitted cleaning schedules to the city to make sure that there's nothing that There's no debris or anything that would even get its way into the streets. I've tried to keep several of the neighbors who've been hospitable in contact as far as what's been going on with these filings so they don't think that we're just derelict and doing nothing. It is absolutely our intention to be positive members of the community as we were in our previous residence.

Okay, very good. Thank

you. Thank you. I don't have any comments or questions. Alderman Gary Feder?

you. Thank you. I don't have any comments or questions. Alderman Fader?

Well, first of all, I would vote in favor of this CUP because I think all the requirements under the CUP ordinance have been met and so there wouldn't be any legitimate basis to turn it down. I would make a couple of comments. We all see projects, construction projects that are delayed because of costs or variety of reasons. You don't often see projects that don't go forward because there's no request for a building permit. And that's what those of us who live on the street and live in Davis Place are aware of, that this was a project in which building permits were not requested despite being told that they needed them, still didn't get them wound up in housing court. If you look at the sign on the house, there's been a stop work order that's now been in place for exactly five months, specifically saying no work can be done because building permits were not issued. And so that's a circumstance that I think for which there is no excuse. It concerns me that I think the city staff went out of its way to deal with the owner's objective of having someone live in the house. There was certainly some confusion whether this person was really a family member, whether they were an employee, but I think the city went out of its to suggest to the applicant that the route to go was the ADU, that that would be actually the way to achieve their objective. But what response do we have? The applicant posts signs, handwritten signs on their yard in the last 48 hours, complaining that the city forced them to go through this process. Now, all of this I think as of tonight is past history and we can move forward. But this whole process is one in my mind of cooperation, an applicant who was willing to admit mistakes when they make them and someone who wants to work with the city. I've not seen that so far. I've not seeing it in the lack of application for building permits. I don't see it in failing to show up in municipal court. And those things obviously happened because the city posted it for that reason. I don't see a level of cooperation when the city goes out of its way to try to accommodate the property owner and then has signs put up two doors from the back of Merrimack School so that every person who walks by can read this diatribe accusing the city of delaying the project. And this delay factor is just absurd that the applicant is talking about being delayed. They went through the normal process, P&Z helped the project make it a lot better project than it was. The city is not responsible for the delay. The city's not responsible for the house that looks a year and a half after it was purchased infinitely worse than it ever looked before. But again, I'd like to see the project built because I'm tired of seeing an eyesore at the end of our street. I hope they do a job. And the real issue is Mr. Singer suggests is what is the building permit process going to be like? We don't really know because the applicant didn't apply for building permits last time. This time they can't build it without get building permits. And I trust Anna and the building department to make sure that the building permit is in every case is complied with. If it is and it's built according to plans and specs, it will probably be a terrific house. But I think the burden now is on the applicant to prove that what has passed is not prologue when it comes to this. So I hope we can have a successful project. And again, I will vote for the CUP. There's no reason not to. But I definitely have concerns about this project from the standpoint of building code.

Sure.

So we can't get building permits until we've passed architecture review and planning and zoning and site plan and all of that. So what he's referring to, the stop work order, there was an allegation of work being done without a permit. What had been done was the removal of moldy drywall just to get it out of there to not have further remediation needed there as far as I was concerned. And as far as my husband thought, there was no permit needed to remove non-structural, just superficial drywall from buildings. parts of the house that needed to be vented. That work order has been there. As soon as that was put up, we did have a meeting with the city. I'm not alleging that the city is the sole reason for the delay. I realize that that's not true. And I don't believe I said that. I'm just saying that we've been going through the process as everyone does since June. And so the delay I was speaking of was the six weeks required to get to this point. As for the sign that he's talking about, I'd be happy to read it to you. It wasn't alleging or complaining. It was simply because I got calls from several people asking if the public notice sign in the front yard was because they were going to auction off our house. So I put a sign out there because it's unclear from the sign. It just says, public hearing to make this an ADU. I had several other people reach out to me asking if we were trying to make it a duplex because they didn't understand that all we're asking is to put a stove in the basement so that we can have our live-in nanny live in the basement. There was nothing about it that was accusatory. There was nothing that was blaming it on the city. I fully admit that this took far longer than we ever anticipated for reasons I won't get into, but we have now you know, about $75,000 into the planning version and probably about 1500 hours between civil design, civil engineering, water mitigation, contacts for vacation of easements, architect, I mean, all of it. There's nothing about this that hasn't been planned and developed and done to the book. You know, as far as the ADU, I didn't originally want to file for an ADU because I was worried that it would change our tax structure on the house and that an assessor would then see it as additional living space and not lower level square footage. That was my objection initially. But when it became clear that the only way in order to get this forward was to file for the ADU so that our live-in nanny could live in the lower level, that's what we ended up having to do. So that's... Okay,

yeah, thank you very much. Okay, thank

you. I have no questions or comments.

Okay, very good. Okay, yeah, I certainly appreciate the past history, I just want to say. I appreciate that. Thank you for reviewing it. But also, I want to echo Alderwoman McAndrew's comment that we're now looking at let's go forward. And let's go forward in a positive, energetic way, building... but building permits i think expire in a year so let's you know see if we can get it done

okay

uh all right so if that's it um i will close the public hearing and ask for a motion

I move to approve resolution number 2023-33, granting a conditional use permit for 515 South Central Avenue to allow for the construction of a rear addition detached accessory dwelling unit.

Second. Any further discussion or questions? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Congratulations. We'll be eager to see your house when it's all done i'm sure it'll be great thank you um okay time for the city manager to report

nothing on there tonight

okay well i thought i should at least give him an opportunity okay now it's time for the consent agenda and again do you want to have anything to say about that i

do not

um Everybody saw what's on the consent agenda. Does anybody want to talk about any of it? All right. May I have a motion for that?

I move to approve the consent agenda with the items listed.

Second. Any discussion?

Alderman Berkowitz? Aye. Alderwoman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Buse? Aye. Alderman Patel. Aye. Alderman Gary Feder. Aye. Aldeman Rick Hummell. Aye. Mayor Harris. Aye. Thank you.

Alderman Berkowitz? Aye. Alderwoman McAndrew? Aye. Alderman Buse? Aye. Alderman Patel. Aye. Alderman Fader. Aye. Aldeman Hummel. Aye. Mayor Harris. Aye. Thank you.

Okay, and now if you're still willing, we'd love to hear about the flock cameras.

Good evening. So I was here in March talking about flock cameras. And during that presentation, we were discussing our deployment strategy and how the cameras function. So this presentation will be more about privacy concerns, how we keep this information private, how we use it. But I'll first address some of those things we talked about back in March, just to refresh your memory. So these are flock license plate recognition cameras. Flock is the company we use. There are several companies out there. The flock cameras, the main function is they provide real-time alerts for stolen cars, cars wanted for other crimes, missing persons. And we can also customize alerts on vehicles. But going back to stolen cars are the main reason these cameras are becoming so prevalent. Right now, there's at least 37 municipalities using flock cameras. other bigger jurisdictions like St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Highway Patrol using other systems. But they became really prevalent last year. As you know, we had a big spike in auto thefts throughout the country, but in our area as well. And we had a 97% increase in Clayton alone and car thefts. So that's why you see a lot of these municipalities using this tool. The other function for the flock cameras are they can be used in criminal investigations. The captured images are used as evidence to solve crimes. They can also connect vehicles to crimes in other jurisdictions. And the technology multiplies our force, and what I mean by that, we can't be everywhere, right? So we have these cameras in strategic locations, and they can notify us if a stolen car or a car wanted for other crimes like robbery come through the area. And they gather objective evidence and facts about a vehicle and other people. So what they're not used for, they're not used traffic violations. They are not red light cameras. They're not used for video surveillance. They take still images of vehicles. They are not used for facial recognition. They're only taking photographs of the rear of vehicles, not people. That's an image of one of our police cars from a flock camera on Daman. As you can see, it's pointed towards the rear of vehicles to get the license plate. The system cannot identify vehicle owners. So when the flock camera sends an alert out, it doesn't tell us who owns the vehicle. The search, when we search the database, it doesn't tells us who owns the vehicles. It will only tell us the type of vehicle that we're looking for or the license plate. If we want to know who owns that vehicle, we have to go into our law enforcement database, the regional justice information system and do a department revenue search. And I won't spend too much time here, but I think we talked about this the last meeting. These are the locations of our flock cameras. The cameras are represented by the green dots. I put blue rings around the cameras owned by the city. The red rings are the ones owned by neighborhood organizations. You can see the two on Southmore. They have two at their entrances. The two on the bottom part of the map, those are two owned by Concordia Seminary. And then there's one owned by the Hillcrest neighborhood. And then there's a couple of green dots on there that don't have circles. There's one on the western end of Clayton, that's actually Richmond Heights camera. There's one further north in U City there. This is what an alert looks like. This is an actual stolen car that came through Clayton on Saturday night. This alert is sent to the officer's cell phone. It's sent to their in-car computer. It's also sent by email. And I redacted the actual license plate at the top of the screen, but it tells you it's a Missouri license plate. The black box is a redacted plate. Stolen vehicle. It occurred as military time at 10 p.m. on Saturday. And the cameras can actually recognize the make and model of the vehicle as well. It's a Toyota Highlander, golden color. You saw the image of our Clayton police car at daytime. They're pretty clear at daytime. At nighttime, That's what you get. But the visual of the license plate is pretty clear. I redacted that as well, the actual license plate. This stolen car was traveling northbound on Big Ben and Clayton Road. So these alerts are only sent to law enforcement customers. As you saw, Southmore has cameras, Hillcrest has cameras, Concordia has cameras. They do not get these alerts. There's no personal identifying information with these alerts as well. So we're a law enforcement customer. For the private entities that own them, like the neighborhoods, they don't get these alerts of stolen cars. They sign over There are cameras to us, essentially, that we can get into their database. The photographs that are taken, we can search those photographs. If a stolen car comes through like the Southmore neighborhood, if it comes through Southmore, we get the alert, not the residents. I

understand that. But you say the flock alerts only go to law enforcement customers. I'm just trying to figure out. That's us, Clayton Police

Department. The Clayton Police Department,

yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, or any other police department. Yes, right. I'm sorry about that. All

right. So this is what a search looks like, the search screen. What I did here, that's my vehicle. I put that in the search there. And you can search by specific license plate like I did with this search. There's an area for the license plate right here. Or you can search – you can just have a blank search there if you're looking for – let's say we have a hit and run accident that happened at a specific time, and you know you're looking for a blue SUV, you wouldn't put a license plate in there. You would just put the location you think it happened at, the timeframe, and you'd look for a blue SUV in that search field. So in this particular one, we did a specific license plate, my license plate. And you can also search, you can narrow down the search you can see the cursor here. You can narrow it down. If you know that you're looking for a specific state, like the state of Missouri, you would click on the state of Missouri for the license plates. You would expand that field. Body type, SUV, you can expand that to put an SUV in there. Make or model, if you know the make we're looking for, you can also select that color. And down here, you can see these are identifiers. I think this came up in a conversation. You can also look for identifiers like roof racks or rear racks. You can also search for window stickers or bumper stickers. You can only search if it has a sticker on there. You can't search for a specific sticker. So if the witness says, yeah, the car that hit me had bumper stickers, you can click on that and it'll show all the cars that came by with bumper stickers. I can't search St. Louis Blues bumper stickers. I look for all the bumper stickers that are coming through the system. Over here is an important field. This is where we put the search reason that comes into play for audits. The officers are directed to put the report number of the incident. That makes it easy to track down for audits. If they don't have a report number drawn at the time, they can put the incident type, like leaving scene accident, stolen car, the date it happened, and the location it happened. So when we do an audit, we can track that. In this particular one, I put board involvement flock demonstration. And you can see that in the audit screen. right here, the reasons here. We did a bunch of demonstration runs today with my data analyst, Cindy. So you can see I ran this one right here, my name, during audit. You can see Cindy ran all these demonstration searches. Then at the bottom, there's actually a search from one of our detectives doing a criminal investigation earlier today. And on the right-hand side, you can see the report number. So if we do an audit, we can track that report number, look and see that he was properly using the system.

And so the networks are all the different flock camera networks that you're connected to and searching?

Yes. You can search. My search was only, I selected the Hillcrest camera and the Clayton cameras. You can select every camera that we share data with if you want to, every network.

So, Chief, you mentioned the city of St. Louis has a different system. Right. But do we share data? We can get their data

from them in the county. Excuse me. Can we do that through a computer matrix still? We call down the billing. We usually call down what they have, the real-time crime center, people monitoring these cameras, and they'll give us the

data.

So in our policy... states no employee shall use or authorize the use of ALPR, A means automatic license plate recognition database records for reasons that are not legitimate law enforcement purposes, misuse of women and associated databases or data may result in disciplinary action. Also states that both active ALPR data and historical ALPR data should be considered for official use only and can be shared with for legitimate law enforcement purposes. So these are flock privacy protections. Images are owned by the agency and are not sold or shared by flock. They don't share this data with third parties. They don't sell it. We have a 30-day retention period to search it. And once the photograph becomes 30 days old, they delete it. The data is encrypted and stored in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Agency contract commits to using the data for legal purposes only. Every agency is supposed to adhere to that, have a policy on that. We talked about this. The investigative reason is required for research of the database, so it should be only used for official purposes only, and we can track that through an audit. We saw an example of the audit. FLOC actually provides the audit in their system. And there's no personal identifiable information captured by FLOC. Again, it's license plates, it's the rear of cars, it's not people. So I think that's pretty much my presentation. So I have time for questions. I got a couple for you. Sure.

One that occurred to me was, so if someone is involved in a civil case, can they subpoena these records prior to their destruction? Is there any reason why they would be? I

actually talked to a legal person at Block and they said, of course, consult your attorney. But if somebody subpoenaed it, the records are up in a cloud and we've never extracted it into a document yet. So if we're not keeping it,

That doesn't work. Discovery goes further, it goes into clouds. Actually, I'm

thinking of Sunshine Law Request.

Sunshine FOI, maybe that's different. My question had to do with subpoenas and whether they'd be subject to a subpoena. I don't know if Kevin has an answer to that.

Thank you. I don't know why at first blush, as you have probably already thought through, I don't know they wouldn't be. But that doesn't mean that there couldn't be an effort to caution control either access to the information or distribution after it's provided. First of all, it's going to have to come pretty quick. That data is only restored for 30 days, which in most civil cases makes the likelihood of a subpoena pretty slim. But, you know, I suppose that's an issue that's going to have to be sorted out when and if that occurs. But my guess is that if the person seeking the subpoena can establish some legitimate evidentiary reason, I don't know why this would be beyond reach.

Mm-hmm.

So all we're

going to get is what we have, a picture of the back of a car. I understand. That was my next question, though. So is there a reason? I know you said the owners would not be identified, but the drivers, the drivers are not identified either. Nobody. So doesn't this have like a limiting usefulness when it comes to maybe understanding who was involved in a crime involving that car?

Yeah, so when you get an alert, I can tell you practical terms. Like when we get an alert there's a stolen car, it just happened a couple days ago in Davis Place. We got an alert. We have a camera near Brentwood and Francis Place. It alerted us to a stolen car. Officers went to the area, tried to find the stolen car, and it was zigzagging through the streets to 8,000 blocks of Davis Place. tried to pull it over, and you know our pursuit policy is pretty strict. That car took off at a high rate of speed and was gone, though. So it was probably in there looking to break into cars, steal cars. So with that alert, we're able to thwart a lot of crimes. We've had a lot of successful stops of criminal activity with these cameras. As far as the database goes, If we can search that plate for the registered owner, if we know a crime was committed, it could be something like a leaving the scene of an accident. We've had quite a few of those. We find the car in the database. We can run that plate in our criminal justice database. I think the important point is that we have private customers out there. There's private customers, subdivisions throughout the country using these type of cameras. They can't get access to who that owner is. That's the point, I think.

Thanks.

Other questions or comments? I have a question. Looking at the privacy protections, which I think is, you know, in my amateur Google search, that's where the concerns are. So the images are owned by Clayton?

Yes.

Okay. So then when you were doing the search and searching places outside of Clayton, is that because we have agreements? We have agreements

with the other, yes, the other

agencies. And so we have, Clayton has... policies on how the information and the images are used? Do the partnering

Yes, they're supposed to. They sign an agreement with law that they'll only use them for law enforcement purposes.

Okay, so that's the general one here and not as specific as ours.

And how that works, it comes into play if we say we make an arrest for people breaking into cars. And we can look at the car they arrived in and put it in the system. We can see prior to coming to Clayton, they were in Creve Coeur. They were in Florissant. We can tell those agencies, hey, if you had car break-ins at this time, that car was in your jurisdiction. And we help each other out with those type of cases. Okay,

thanks.

Questions, comments?

Yeah. So I was going to ask, do we ever download the photos or the images?

Sure. If it's evidence of a crime.

Okay. And then who has... I'm curious about the cameras that were purchased by residents as opposed to the city and a little bit more about the nature of their... So understanding they don't get alerts. I think you said like, do they have access to any of the footage or data? Like what is there?

Cause it's, it's, you know, these are photographs in a public space. So they have access to it. Now, discussing like with the trustees at Hillcrest, they decided they didn't want to have access to it, they don't search it. And so I've given these neighborhoods model policies from other neighborhoods across the country where it states these certain people will have access to it and only be searched for whatever reason. Most neighborhoods Don't want to touch it. They just basically hand over the information to the police. They could access it. There's things they can do to reassure their neighbors that they're not misusing it. They could do their own audit. They could publish their audit. Hopefully their audit shows zero searches for this month. You know, they could do things like that.

Um, thank you. I was, cause I was thinking about this, like it's, um, I mean like people have ring cameras on the front of their houses that are potentially recording people in public, all that. Right. So, um, understanding you don't have the expectation of a right to privacy. Um, but in this case, the camera is like installed on public property or like in the public right of way right right so like it isn't like a homeowner's private property where they're installing a camera so um and so that's i'm sorry yeah no go ahead just talk about that health

more has it on their own property one of concordia's has is on their own property i believe the other one is on um on public property but we would issue a permit for that

Okay. Just kind of thinking through it. Yeah. I think there was some on the search screen, there was a like public versus private cameras option. Yes. Does that get out whether they're owned by a law enforcement agency or something else, or is that not different?

So you could search just the private cameras in your jurisdiction that we have access to.

Okay. And then it suggests that it would have images without plates in it.

So there are people driving around. A lot of times car thieves pull the plate right off.

Oh, so it would still capture an image of the vehicle because a vehicle goes by, but it recognizes that there is no plate on it.

That's correct.

Okay. Thank you. All right. Those are my questions. Thanks.

I'll pass.

Tired from the last one. How long have we been using this?

So we got the first cameras in, I believe, September of 2021 in the Hillcrest neighborhood. And then it was kind of like a pilot program to figure out if we want to use this technology. It was starting to expand. They said St. Louis City has had these cameras probably 10 years. All the big metropolitan areas have had these cameras for a long time in fixed positions. We've actually had them mobile on police cars for at least 10 years. moving around but in a fixed position uh uh so it started in 2021 and then it started slowly expanding from there um so now we have we have 11 cameras currently clayton owns 11 cameras in the private subdivisions have five there's been some talk from other subdivisions they're they they ask about it i know one subdivision wants it but they're limited because They're powered by solar. You could hardwire it, but they'd have to pay for electricity to come out to their entrance and they're not willing to do that yet. But so there is some interest from other neighborhoods in doing it.

Okay. And so I'm curious if you could comment on the value proposition of this. I'm thinking of maybe the obvious crime resolution or crime investigation, but maybe deterrence, but that might not be an issue. I'm just curious, why do you value these?

I think it does. It gives us an opportunity to thwart stolen cars. That's the main reason. In 2022, we had 61 stolen cars. The year before in 2021, we had 31. So we had a 97% increase in one year. A lot of that had to do with the Kia and Hyundai trend. Right now we're tracking, we should have a 20-25% decrease in stolen cars this year. So we've had numerous, numerous occasions where we've thwarted stolen cars. In fact, we had an instance, a lot of guns recovered. Yeah,

in the last two years, we've recovered three guns from it. And I know one of those guns.

So we've had several guns and just like recently in July, we had a stolen car come through the Morelands. Our officers were alerted to it. Our officers came head to head with it. It backed out, drove down Clayton Road, Richmond Heights, deployed a spike strip. That's a tool that will deflate your tires. The car came to a rest in front of the Cheshire Hotel. Uh, four, four suspects ran from it. We apprehended one and he had a fully automatic stolen gun, which is a federal offense. We're trying to make a federal case on that. So it's, it's, uh, instant and we've had other, other instances where we've had juveniles who not even old enough to drive legally who are out in these stolen cars and we're able to stop that as well.

And it's, it's probably obvious, but talk about why this is cost-effective relative to having more people on the

forces as a contract. Well, it's $2,500 per camera. So, you know, currently we have 11 out there. So that's 27,000 roughly a year that we're spending on these cameras. Whereas an extra officer, you're, you're talking, you know, over a hundred thousand dollars in salary and benefits plus a vehicle, which are very expensive right now. And yeah, Like I said, it's not just that. It's also recording the evidence. Someday we have these on our main thoroughfares. It's coming to play with some mid-level crimes. I know in other jurisdictions these cameras have solved murders. Someday we're going to have a crime that occurred and the criminals are going to be going up and down Hanley or Big Ben. It's going to be very helpful in solving that case. Great.

Thank you.

Thanks. I want to ask just a related question about cameras, but not flat cameras. Whatever happened to red light cameras?

So there was a lawsuit going back some time, I'm not sure, five, six, seven years ago, where they found them to be, I guess, unconstitutional because the, well, Kevin, are you able to, is it because there wasn't a defendant to, you're issuing a ticket to a car and not to a specific defendant? Oh,

thank

you.

Your assistant.

As I recall the case, and I wish I'd been told to do my homework. As I recall, the tickets were issued to the owner of the vehicle on the theory that the offense was a public safety violation from allowing one's vehicle to be in an intersection contrary to the instructions on the signal, not going through the signal as a driver. And the courts did not accept that premise. I understand, and this is pure speculation, the city of St. Louis is talking about bringing him back, but I think that is with the driver identification photo, and they will only be prosecuting if they can establish that their photo matches their defendant.

Or the

defendant. I can tell you that this is just hypothetical. Somebody told me that where they are in effect, I think in Minneapolis and in Iowa, and the pictures i have heard now take a very clear picture of the driver of the vehicle as they go through

so i guess just a question and don't have to have an answer i mean do we i mean i know we have incidents of people running lights

sure

and um i know that that's getting worse and worse and uh i wonder if we should Had you guys talked about reinstating some red light cameras?

We have not. I wonder if it would be a good discussion for the community. When we installed these cameras in Hillcrest, we had a discussion with the neighbors first. We discussed it and they approved it. When we moved it on the other side of Des Moines, we had a conversation with the High Point Des Moines neighborhood. So we had support, generate support before we put these into the neighborhoods. Maybe that's something...

I don't know. I'm just thinking, you know, maybe it's something to reconsider if the technology is that improved that it solves the issue, whatever it was. I

feel like when some of our worst offenders though, in terms of intersections are county controlled, which is a little, probably a little bit more like difficult to push through. So

yeah, I don't know how that would work. Okay. Yeah. That's just my perspective

because it is terrible. The red light thing. It just seems like a lot of it's on county controlled roads, but

okay. Well, that's true. Can I ask one more question? I'm sorry. Just so I understand, the map of where we have the cameras, my understanding is that you all strategically place them so that we pretty much have all the access points into Clayton. And so when it goes in the neighborhoods, it's additional information, but from where you strategically place them, we already have a pretty good seal around

For the most part, we have the main thoroughfares, Hanley and Big Bend covered. We have Clayton Road. And then, you know, I've been here almost 24 years now. And those neighborhoods along Skinker are constantly targeted for car break-ins. And it goes back a long time. So we have the entrance points in the Hillcrest neighborhood and the Des Moines neighborhood as well.

Good. Anything else? Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right. I think at this time we need to, there's nothing else. We need to go into closed session to finish up some personnel stuff. So if we could have that motion.

I move that the Board of Aldermen hold a closed meeting with a closed vote and record as authorized by Section 610.021, Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the revised Statutes of Missouri relating to legal issues, real estate, and or personnel negotiation of a contract pursuant to Section 610.01. part 12 of the revised statutes of Missouri and or proprietary information pursuant to section 610.021, part 15 and or information related to public safety and security measures pursuant to sections 610.0 21 parts 18 and 19 of the revised statures of Missouri.

Well done. Alderman Berkowitz. Aye. Alderwoman McAndrew. Aye. Alderman Buse. Aye. Aldermen Patel. Aye. Alderman Gary Feder?

Well done. Alderman Berkowitz. Aye. Alderwoman McAndrew. Aye. Alderman Buse. Aye. Aldermen Patel. Aye. Alderman Fader?

Aye.

Alderman Rick Hummell?

Alderman Hummel?

Aye.

Mayor Harris?

Aye. Thank you. Okay. All right, so...