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Smile and say, Cheese! Come January, you may be captured by the Town of Oakland’s new 72-camera, high-resolution surveillance system.
In their final meeting of 2025, town commissioners unanimously voted Dec. 9 to hire CJS Communications of Orange City to replace and upgrade the police department’s outdated, often-on-the-fritz security camera system at a cost of $145,051.20.
“The Town of Oakland has a camera system, which is aged and experiences frequent outages and service problems,” Mike Bryant, deputy chief of police, told the commission ahead of the vote. He added that it was challenging to locate recordings on the server housed at the police station when they were needed for followup, and customer service for maintenance when the system went down was spotty.
CJS Communications was the across-the-board favorite of the four-member employee committee tasked with evaluating submissions to the police department's request for proposals.
The new cameras, which cost $179 apiece, will cover Oakland Avenue Charter School, Oakland Nature Preserve, Town Hall, Oakland Meeting Hall, Healthy West Orange Arts and Heritage Museum, Speer Park, Pollard Park, the police department, public works and the town’s lift stations.
The current information storage system will be replaced by a cloud-based system with 30-day retention and advanced AI-driven search features.
As an example, Bryant told commissioners that if a child were lost in one of Oakland’s parks or at the Oakland Nature Preserve and police knew the child was wearing a red shirt, they could type “red shirt” into the new system to quickly go through their cameras and get a jump on locating the child.
“ We wanted to make sure that whoever did this for us did not use proprietary software, so if for some reason we didn't like the way they were handling it and we wanted to switch, the cameras are ours and can be used by the next company, whoever we pick down the road. We wouldn't have to start over and buy cameras again,” Bryant said.
Oakland Police Department impact fees will cover the cost of the cameras and software for fiscal year 2025-2026. Thereafter, annual software and licensing fees for the system will be spread across each department’s budgets, according to a memo to the town commission from Chief of Police Darryl Esan, included in the agenda packet.
CJS Communications was not the priciest company, nor the least expensive. The highest bid was $227,877.74; the lowest was $139,883.00.
