By a unanimous vote, the Danville City Council Public Services Committee has voted for the purchase and placement of 30 license plate reading cameras around the city to help track those suspected of crimes. Mayor Rickey Williams, Jr. pointed out that ten cameras from Comcast, placed around the city less than a year ago, are also for fighting crime, but serve a different purpose.
AUDIO: The Comcast cameras are a much larger picture. They’re looking at a whole area, where as these new cameras will be focusing only on vehicles at the vehicular level and the license plate level. So think of it as a macro-view versus a micro-view.
The mayor also stated that these new cameras are absolutely not designed to catch people running red lights.
AUDIO: If you run a red light, it’s not going to automatically issue a ticket. No tickets or anything like that will be automatically issued by this. It’s literally just for us to track vehicles that have been used in the commission of a crime, and most often times violent crime of some sort or any kind of drug activity.
Also passed on to the full City Council by the Public Services Committee was a decision to change a city ordinance, that would now allow residents to place RVs or campers in their own driveways, if they are kept up properly, as the mayor explains.
AUDIO: The ordinance currently requires them to place them either in a side yard or a back yard. So a lot of people are doing that, or they’re paying a lot of money to store them. My thought is that if people have their vehicle; and it’s well maintained, it looks good, it’s operational, it’s licensed; why would we not we allow them to park it in their own driveway, as long as it doesn’t obstruct view, or isn’t in the public right-of-way in any way.
The mayor says it’s his personal opinion that the vehicles would certainly look better in the driveway, rather than in a side yard or back yard.
