City buying dashboard cams for winter fleet
Would provide evidence for damage claims, reduce municipal insurance costs: CAO
Remember to smile when a city snowplow or maintenance truck drives by you this winter.
You’ll be on camera.
Niagara Falls is buying 27 dashboard cameras for its municipal fleet, to protect the city from frivolous damage claims related to road-clearing during hazardous weather.
“It will provide us with a visual record of what happened,” said city chief administrative officer Ken Todd. “And that can work both ways, that can be good for us or it can say hey, it was our fault.
“The record is going to be the record, whatever the video
shows.”
There have already been eight incidents in 2018 involving city fleet vehicles. Six occurred earlier in the year, where snowplows struck another vehicle, and two where a privately owned car or truck hit a city vehicle.
So far in 2018 and for the two years previous, there were 28 incidents involving collisions between plows or city vehicles and privately owned vehicles, or a city vehicle causing property damage.
In the same period, there were a total of 121 claims involving issues like slip and fall sidewalk claims, damage caused by fallen trees or branches, snowplows damaging lawns, driveways or parked cars, or cars damaged by potholes. The $44,395 cost to buy the dashboard cameras was approved by city council earlier this week.
“These are large vehicles that are susceptible to some pretty extreme conditions out there,” said Todd, adding the city pays about $1.4 million each year for liability insurance.
“I wouldn’t point to a particular incident, but we do seem to have a number of incidents that occur,” he said. “Being under extreme conditions, it’s hard really to determine what happened … they seem to be fairly common occurrences with weather conditions.”
City staff tried out a dashboard camera during August and September this year, using a shift supervisor’s vehicle. Over 30 days, staff reported, four incidents were recorded and used to deflect claims against the city.
“We’ve improved our risk management practices over the last four or five years to do two things,” said Todd.
“Hopefully prevent accidents from happening … it also helps reduce your insurance costs. If you’re not having as many claims, your insurance premiums are coming down.”