100 to be installed on municipal properties to reduce vandalism
The Camp Verde Town Council during its Wednesday, Oct. 7 meeting unanimously approved $221,546 for 100 security cameras and $65,584 for its monitoring software with Oculens LLC as two items.
In 2025 the town spent 600 staff hours and $37,000 remediating graffiti, which Capital Improvement Program Project Manager Martin Smith said is time not spent on other routine maintenance and priority projects adding “the maintenance department is already understaffed.”
Currently the town operates three different systems: One for the Camp Verde Unified School District property that includes Butler Park, the Heritage Skate Park and the Heritage Pool, another for the Town Hall complex, and finally one for the Camp Verde Community Library.
Smith laid out three challenges for the current systems that the new one addresses:
- They all use different system architecture
- The camera resolution for the current systems makes it difficult to positively identify vandalism suspects
- The cameras do not have pan, tilt or zoom capabilities, which creates blind spots in their coverage.
“As the town has grown, there are also facilities that have no protection, namely the sports complex and Verde Lakes Park,” Smith said. “At the Dec. 17, 2025 regular meeting, town staff made a presentation on the increase of town vandalism, Council directed the staff to prepare an FY 27 budget sheet for the new camera system to get that into the budget”.
The biggest benefit Smith cited is vandalism deterrence. A March 2019 study reviewing 40-years of CCTV surveillance for crime prevention in the journal Criminology & Public Policy shows “that CCTV is associated with a significant and modest decrease in crime. The largest and most consistent effects of CCTV were observed in car parks, and need for CCTV to be narrowly targeted on vehicle crimes and property crime and not be deployed as a stand-alone” crime prevention measure.
The package does not include mobile cameras, however, the town can relocate the equipment as needed.
Cameras will be installed at the Streets Facility, Animal Shelter, Heritage Pool, Heritage Skate Park, Butler Park, CVCL and Rezzonico Park, Business Resource & Innovation Center, Redinger Ramada, the three buildings of the Town Hall complex, Lower Maintenance Building, Finance Building, Camp Verde Marshal’s Office, Camp Verde Sports Complex and the Camp Verde Equestrian Center.
“The new monitoring software makes searching for data much easier and much more efficient,” Smith said. “Our current way of doing [this] is we have to watch the footage back in real time. There is no fast forward capabilities, so this is time-intensive, and you have to go camera by camera. There’s no real way to put filters in. The new software does have search filters, which will expedite the search for a particular event”.
The new software includes “proactive alerts” Smith said that will be able to alert the town if someone enters a facility outside of regular hours, or is loitering near the exit of the pool, as an example.
“We have the ability to draw a boundary around the park, and if someone crosses that line after the park is supposed to be closed, that would generate an alert as well. And what’s nice about that is the software recognizes direction,” Smith said. “Somebody leaving the park wouldn’t necessarily create an alert, but someone entering the park once they cross that line would”.
The video for every camera is stored on that device for 30 days with backup to a cloud storage with no physical media. However for footage of interest, such as a crime, the town can retain that footage until it is manually deleted.
The Camp Verde Marshal’s Office will be the administrator. The dispatch center will be able to monitor the live feeds and retrieve data, along with Town Marshal Dan Jacobs, CVMO lieutenants and the Public Safety Systems administrator.
Vice Mayor Wendy Escoffier asked for a data security policy to be drafted and asked what the annual cost for the software is after the three-year term.
“I believe it is like $18,000 a year,” Smith said, and added the cameras are purchased and the software is leased. “We opted for the three-year lease to basically test drive the equipment [and] test drive the software”.
Town Manager
Some 34 people have applied to be the next town manager, to replace Miranda Fisher, who resigned July 9. There were seven semifinalists interviewed on Tuesday, Oct. 6.
Four finalists were selected on Tuesday, Oct. 13, after print deadline, to meet and greet residents at the Camp Verde Community Library, with council interviewing the finalists during a closed-door executive session on Wednesday, Oct. 14.
