CCTV Infrastructure Costs Continue To Rise

Invercargill City’s CCTV infrastructure will require ongoing operational costs for data storage and licensing that comes at a significant cost.

Cr Ian Pottinger requested further information under the Local Government Official Information Meetings Act for council to provide a breakdown of the expenditure on the project to date.

General manager of Infrastructure Erin Moogan told the Infrastructure and Projects Committee yesterday, the ongoing costs form a significant portion of the operation costs – around two thirds.

Cr Pottinger’s question in his request was to explain the rationale and benefits to ratepayers of cloud-based storage.

Mana whenua representative Pania Coote said after reading the report she still didn’t know what the costs were, but Erin said they hadn’t provided an actual breakdown as that was part of the bidding tender process, and commercially sensitive.

Erin admitted she was surprised when getting involved in the project about the costs, “and didn’t expect it have that ongoing licensing fee simply for operating cameras.”

“I guess it’s similar to your PC with the Microsoft license and for software to be upgraded and free of bugs,” she said.

For cameras of this type to be able to record license plate recognition, it was common to have a licence.

Council’s IT specialist Richard Hutton also confirmed cloud-based storage was much more common nowadays than using hardware, and consistent with other areas using CCTV.

Staff confirmed it would cost around $750/month to store just 28 days of camera footage.

The initial budget for the CCTV infrastructure was just $250,000 and quickly increased to $450,000 just for stage one, and last estimates had it at $2.3 million over five years.

The network design involved building the data network of fibre and wireless solutions for the onsite cameras to link into a storage device.

Safer Cities had initially been working on the project but council learned earlier this year, they had lack of understanding of the network capability for the 133 cameras.