Paonia’s town board reversed itself on May 12, 2026 and now says within the next 30 days it will remove and sell the AI-enabled surveillance camera system it purchased and had installed last year at a cost to town residents of $53,000. The town board purchased the system, and had it installed and entered into a 3 year contract with the company that sold them the cameras without taking any public comment first. The system had the capacity for facial recognition, which town board members assured citizens was not in use. But Paonia resident and former member of the town’s planning board, Pete McCarthy, obtained the audit logs of the cameras through an open records request and found that the facial recognition function was not only turned on, but had been accessed by Paonia Police Department personnel about 100 times across 65 days. McCarthy also found the town had been creating permanent video archives from the town hall’s interior cameras, and that the archives were being labeled with the names of town employees. McCarthy also discovered the town has no written policy guiding how the surveillance cameras and their data should be used.
All of this information, the fact that the town board had lied to residents and citizens’ concern over their civil rights led to heated discussion about the camera system at several town board meetings, with a flood of angry comments from the public about the cameras and how town was using them. Then, on April 28, with two new, younger members sitting on Paonia’s Town Board, the Board unanimously decided to shut the cameras off, dismantle the system within 30 days and try to sell it to recoup some of its cost.
Every community should be doing this. Good for Paonia Town Board and shows how important voting for our local representatives is. Impressive.