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WILKES-BARRE — The former Hawkeye Security Solutions Inc. has one remaining steady source of funding, but it’s not likely the Wilkes-Barre Parking Authority will continue to pay the city when no one has been monitoring the camera surveillance system for months.
Mayor Tony George disclosed Monday that many of the nearly 300 cameras in the $3.6 million system don’t work and the command center in the police headquarters where the video monitors taking the camera feeds are located is locked and isn’t staffed.
The Parking Authority’s executive director, Tom Torbik, said Tuesday its board meets next month and will decide whether to renew the three-year agreement that expires Nov. 1.
“It doesn’t look very good,” Torbik said.
The authority has been paying $100,000 a year to the not-for-profit Hawkeye for cameras installed in three parking garages downtown. The money has been going directly to the city since Hawkeye dissolved in December. The other steady funding source vanished in 2013 when the Wilkes-Barre Area School District rejected a $270,000, three-year contract with Hawkeye.
The authority’s board has been receiving monthly updates from its representative from LAZ Parking that manages the garages and has been told that the cameras are working, Torbik said.
“We assume that they’re being monitored,” he said. But Torbik said no one from the city informed him that they were not.
No one from Legion Security Services Inc. has been in the command center since early this year, said Dale Rinker, a vice president with the company and a former city police department detective. Legion had a month-to-month contract for one monitor in the command center at the rate of $15 an hour for 88 hours a week.
“It was not very long into (2016)” when the city gave a 30-day notice that it was ending the contract with Legion, Rinker said.
Around the same time, city police officers were locked out of the command center, added Sgt. Phil Myers, president of the Wilkes-Barre Police Benevolent Association. Officers had been able to review video from surveillance cameras before Hawkeye got up and running in 2010, he explained.
“We’ve been denied access to a tool that we’ve used since 2007,” Myers said. Under the new protocol, officers have to put in a request with Police Chief Marcella Lendacky to see a video, he said.
The officers would like to see the system maintained, Myers said.
Ted Wampole, city administrator, said the mayor supports the concept of a camera surveillance system, but still to be determined is “whether we can make it work with this system” and how the city will pay for it. The mayor has been talking to a consultant about the system, he said.
“We’re going to wait and see what our options are,” Wampole said.