Paonia town resident Pete McCarthy addresses Paonia town council about AI-enabled facial recognition cameras installed around town.
In the fall of 2025, without giving residents any notice or soliciting public comment, the Paonia Town Board purchased about 2 dozen AI-enabled surveillance cameras from the Verkada security company at an initial cost to local taxpayers of $50,288. Members of the town board were apparently unaware before making the purchase that Verkada had been fined $2.95 million by the FTC in August of 2024 for failing to secure customer data, which permitted a 2021 hack that exposed over 150,000 live cameras — including in hospitals and schools — to cyber criminals. The company also violated the CAN-SPAM Act by deluging people with marketing emails that gave recipients no way to opt out of the emails or get taken off the company’s email list. Verkada faced even more charges as well, including posting fake reviews of its equipment, making misleading statements about its data protection and misrepresenting its compliance with HIPAA laws.
After being informed about Verkada’s many transgressions and the massive fine the government levied against the company, Paonia’s mayor, Paige Smith, said at an April 14, 2026 pubic meeting, “I have no idea what they did wrong.”
The town installed the surveillance cameras in the town’s public park, at the local wastewater treatment facility and the interior and exterior of the Paonia Town Hall. The cameras are capable of facial recognition and Verkada requires purchasers buy a subscription to the company’s proprietary cloud AI storage for each camera at a cost ranging from $99 to over $1,000 per year per camera, depending on the desired retention period for the data (from 30–365 days) and the license duration (1–10 years).
Concern over threats to civil liberties
Paonia resident Pete McCarthy recognized the threat the cameras and the capabilities for data collection posed to people’s civil liberties. He submitted Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests to the town seeking information about the cameras and how the town was using them. He got back about 38,000 records that he pored over and analyzed to find out how the town was using the cameras and the data they collected.
After citizens expressed worry about the cameras, members of the town board claimed the facial recognition function in the cameras was never in use, but an audit log McCarthy obtained through a CORA request showed that the cameras’ facial recognition function had not only been activated, but had been accessed by town Police Department personnel. McCarthy found the Paonia Police Chief’s account alone had opened the facial identity database 100 times across 65 distinct days, from October 22, 2025 through March 16, 2026. McCarthy also found that the town had been creating permanent video archives from the town hall’s interior cameras, and that the archives were being labeled with town employees’ names. McCarthy also found the town has no written policy guiding how the surveillance cameras and their data should be used. When a citizen asked to see the town’s policy on use of the cameras, they got back copies of the cameras’ device configuration pages with a claim that the pages were in fact the town’s surveillance policy, apparently in a hope that the person requesting the policy wouldn’t understand what they had actually gotten and think the town actually had a surveillance camera policy in place. But the town has no written policy governing the use, access or retention of footage obtained by the cameras beyond manufacturer’s default settings, leaving ripe the possibility for surveillance abuse by the many people who can access the data.
Given the misrepresentations that town board members made to the public, and the board’s evident lack of understanding about how these cameras and the data they collect can be abused, McCarthy asked the town to turn off every public camera and physically cover them until the town adopts a policy guiding their use. He also asked the town to put use of the AI surveillance cameras on the ballot, so town residents can vote on whether or not to have the cameras.
The issue has led to heated discussions at town board meetings.
The biggest reason the town gave for installing the cameras was to address vandalism to public parks and town facilities, which has been a problem. But a resident who is an experienced software engineer pointed out,
“…If you have a camera that is connected to the internet, you don’t have control anymore. You have already given up control. There’s a company that can access that data, [and] they get to decide when they pull data into their cloud and when they don’t. And you would never know about it. It’s not the town of Paonia that I’m worried about having any kind of nefarious activity on the cameras. It’s the fact that we’re giving up control to a much wider surveillance network.”
McCarthy said at a public meeting that he noticed one of the surveillance cameras is pointing directly into the studio where he takes Yoga classes.
Sarah Peterson, another town resident, said,
“In an era where our brown-skinned neighbors are being swept off of streets and thrown in vans and put in facilities, there is real tangible danger to having this kind of data out in the world. And I don’t feel comfortable with that. And I would really have appreciated it if you had put this to a vote.”
Indeed, reports abound showing surveillance camera data has been abused by government employees to spy on activists, journalists, business owners and others. As of April 28, 2026, fourteen incidents have been reported of cops allegedly using AI surveillance camera data to follow spouses, exes and even complete strangers.
To help local citizens follow this issue, McCarthy started a website called Paonia Truth Nuggets, where he posts links to documents he’s obtained through CORA requests, that allow him to back up statements he’s made about how the town is actually using the cameras and track differences between what members of the town board say about the cameras and what their audit logs actually show. McCarthy posts letters he writes to the town board and the responses he gets back, and tracks all the edits the town makes to draft responses before they issue their final responses to questions about the camera issue. While doing this, McCarthy found, for example, that the town was editing out things like personal attacks made against citizens in their initial drafts.