- May 4, 2024
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Palm Coast has given the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office $60,000 to outfit each deputy with a lapel camera.
The money comes from a state grant, funded through traffic fines, for police automation initiatives.
Flagler County Sheriff’s deputies do not currently have dash cameras. The lapel cameras, though, are more versatile because they show what deputies see when they leave a cruiser.
“These video cameras are invaluable,” City Manager Jim Landon said. “Oftentimes, there’s a dispute as to the officer did this, or that happened; and if the officer was acting appropriately, it shows that. If they’re acting inappropriately, it shows that. If there’s a he-said, she-said with two citizens, this helps too.”
The Sheriff’s Office already has 20 of the tiny cameras, which are manufactured by the Taser corporation.
They can be worn on a deputy’s collar, over the ear or mounted on a pair of sunglasses, and stay in a kind of buffering stand-by mode when worn until a deputy presses a button. Then they start recording — not at the point of the button press, but 30 seconds before.
Each individual camera costs about $500. The grant money also provides for related equipment like charging docks.
City addresses salary rumors
There’s a number popping up on internet sites concerning Palm Coast, and city council members have started hearing it from constituents, too: $750,000.
Sometimes it’s mentioned as a bit less, sometimes a bit more, but it’s usually presented — misleadingly — as the combined amount of City Manager Jim Landon’s and City Attorney Bill Reischmann’s salaries. It isn’t.
Palm Coast Councilman Bill McGuire brought the issue up at a Tuesday-morning city council workshop.
“Gentlemen, again it’s an election year, and I’m getting communications from various citizens,” he said. “And the latest thing that’s floating around is that $750,000 is what we’re spending on the city manager and the attorney.” City staff attending the meeting laughed.
“Everytime there’s an election, this comes up,” McGuire said. “Does the council feel it would be good to have a breakdown? Because I tried telling some people, that’s not what these two guys make. That’s the budget for running those offices, for having the services of the firm that Mr. Reischmann represents. It’s not just him. It’s the people that deal with code enforcement and the other assistance that we get. The same with the city manager’s office.”
Landon’s annual base salary is $168,878.
Reischmann is not a direct employee of the city. Palm Coast pays his law firm $22,500 per month for the services of a number of attorneys who specialize in different areas, including code enforcement, planning, litigation, personnel matters and construction.
“What people do is they’ll take the department budgets and make it sound like that’s our salaries,” Landon said at the workshop. He said he carries his W-2 form, and would be willling to publish it to dispell the rumors.
“My salary is very consistent, middle of the road for a city manager of a community this size in Florida for the experience I have and the number of years I have in this business," he said.
McGuire and Landon said at the meeting that the approximately-$750,000 figure is an innacurate, politically-motivated one-liner.
“That’s like, you could take the whole budget of the whole city and call it my salary if you want to stretch it,” Landon said. “It’s almost as goofy.”
