Mason City council delays vote on proposal to provide free wireless internet downtown, deploy technology to improve public safety

MASON CITY — After an hour-long discussion, the City Council in Mason City last night voted to postpone a decision on a proposal that would provide free public wireless internet access in the downtown area while at the same time would deploy technology downtown to improve public safety.

The “SAFEcity Solution” utilizes a system that includes gunshot detection, license plate readers, video cameras as well as a wireless guardian that sees devices that emit radio waves for communications. The cost of implementing the “SAFEcity Solution” would be offset by the free wifi “SMARTcity Solution”, which would generate an estimated $500,000 annually in advertising revenue to the city.

Police Chief Jeff Brinkley says in the past two years, the city has seen an increase in violent crime and firearms-related crime, while at the same time, law enforcement has faced unprecedented challenges in recruitment and staffing. He says this system would help with some of those challenges.  “There are a lot of other tools that are available to us through this solution that we currently don’t have. We’ve had a lot of incidents where we have known parties who are involved in some of these incidents, but they are not cooperative with us in the investigation. Sometimes some of the other evidence that is sometimes available to us just isn’t in these cases. What this does is that leverages some of those tools and that technology to give us the opportunity to generate leads in cases like these.”

Brinkley used a murder investigation on the downtown plaza last fall as an example of how the system could be utilized to investigate a crime.   “The shooting on the plaza last October would have been captured by this system, almost in its entirety. That to me, if we don’t have an officer there like we did, we’re looking at probably an unsolved homicide and a gun on the street that maybe shoots a cop, based on the history that we know about the individual involved. That would be front and center. That really concerned me when that happened, not that we haven’t had other problems down there before as you know. That was good police work that night that made that come together.”

Brinkley and City Administrator Aaron Burnett have been working on this proposal for about six months, but some on the council were not happy about just finding out the details of the proposal late last week. Brinkley says he and Burnett have worked hard to try to find solutions to better investigate crime in the community.   “With all due respect to that Councilman Masson, I also think we’re in a spot in our community where we’ve never been. That’s part of the reason I think we got it rushed to you was we’re not really excited about what happened in the first week of April, and for you to make the investment to make our community safe is why we’re here tonight. We want to be able to stand up proudly six months from now, 12 months from now, 18 months from now and say look what we did because of how we were supported. So I think that’s not lost on me, but at the same time, you’ve trusted us to go out when we are 13 cops down and fix that, and we’ve started doing that.”

Paul Adams was one of four councilmen who supported a motion to delay deciding on the issue for two weeks.  “If we need another meeting to take an hour or an hour-and-a-half to have something a little more formal, that’s fine by me to get it right. The amenity aspect is important, but the public safety and the crime-fighting aspect is way too important to lose it all tonight.”

Adams says he wants to hear from the public about this proposal. “It’s important for the public to engage us in these types of projects. We always ask for feedback, but we’re asking for feedback directly, give it to us, call us, whatever you need to do, we want to hear your thoughts on the project, on the way it’s presented.”

Adams, along with councilmen John Lee, Joshua Masson and Wil Symonds all voted to delay voting on the proposal for two weeks, while councilmen John Jazsewski and Tom Thoma voted against the delay.

To see the details of the proposal, click on this link and head to page 127