Public Safety, Finance & Special Meeting
August 20, 2026 | Troy City Council
August 20, 2026 | Troy City Council
The Public Safety Committee was a working session with no votes; no minutes are published for it. Proceedings below are from the meeting transcript.
The Public Safety Committee spent nearly two hours reviewing Troy Police Department's Flock camera audit and a 60-day tracking test the council had requested. The department could not tell the council how many crimes the cameras have actually helped solve, and its own count of how often the tool was used in one misdemeanor case ranged from 14 to 90 searches depending on who was counting. Past logs also showed the Houston, Texas police department alone ran more than 1.1 million searches of Troy's camera data before the city cut off that access in March.
The Finance Committee passed Local Law 4, a charter amendment tightening the mayor's emergency declaration power, 7-0. Sponsor Struber's research found Troy's mayor has declared eight states of emergency since 2024, far more than comparable cities in the region. A separate battery storage zoning ordinance was tabled after Corporation Counsel told the council, only at the meeting itself, that state law required a monthslong environmental review the council had not been told about. The council also received the second-quarter financial report, three weeks after its legal deadline and weeks after Mayor Mantello called that same deadline "outdated," even though she wrote it into the city code herself in 2018.
At the Special Meeting, the council put remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds toward a North Lake improvement project and a Fair Park neighborhood project. Eight residents used the public forum to press the council on Flock, citing outside research questioning its effectiveness, wrongful stops elsewhere, and gaps between the technology's marketing and Troy's own audit numbers.
Working session, no votes taken. Chair: Council Member McKee. Chief DeWolf, Deputy Chief Barker, Assistant Chief Mason, and Captain Dean answered questions; the public could observe but not speak.
Chair McKee limited the session to two items: the Troy Police Department's (TPD) audit logs for its Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, and the results of a 60-day tracking test the department ran at the council's request. Both reports had been released to the public the day before.
McKee opened with the department's data deletion policy. TPD's Flock data is automatically deleted after 30 days, straight from Flock's own servers, not TPD's. When McKee pointed to audit-log searches that appeared to reach back 90 days, Chief DeWolf and Captain Dean explained the searches were not pulling old data: they were continuing an open case under its original case number. An officer running a fresh search on day 90 of an investigation can only see the 30 days immediately before that search, never the original incident date. Once the 30 days pass, the department said, the data is simply gone. "We've tried, like with a very important case, 'hey, this data has got to be somewhere, can we subpoena it,'" Chief DeWolf said. "It's not there. It's gone."
TPD has 137 active Flock sharing agreements, but McKee noted audit logs showing searches touching more than 200 individual camera networks. Chief DeWolf and Captain Dean explained that a single partner can operate many networks: Home Depot alone accounts for roughly 100 camera networks and Lowe's for about 99, all under one sharing agreement each. TPD confirmed it could search any of those store networks anywhere in New York State, though officers said they would typically narrow a search to a specific location and time window tied to an investigation. Asked why TPD would ever need to search a retailer with no Troy location, Assistant Chief Mason cited leads like a suspect's employer or a vehicle spotted near a store after a crime. McKee noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted Home Depot locations elsewhere for immigration enforcement; the department said it had no direct experience with that, since Troy has no Home Depot of its own. TPD does not have reciprocal search access to other agencies' data through those retail agreements, Captain Dean said; only law enforcement agencies can search each other's data.
TPD turned off Flock's national lookup feature on March 18. Before that, the feature meant Troy's sharing agreement extended to every other agency nationwide using national lookup, roughly 6,000 agencies. Audit logs for the prior two years showed the Houston, Texas police department alone ran more than 1.1 million searches of Troy's data. TPD said it would only learn of that access after running an audit log, never in real time. "I'm glad you turned that off," McKee told the chief. Chief DeWolf said the tradeoff was real: "Unless we have a murder suspect that flees to Houston in a car."
McKee pressed the department on why it could not tell the council how many crimes, particularly stolen vehicles and violent crimes, had actually been solved using Flock data, despite the tool being marketed for exactly that. Captain Dean said TPD has no administrative process linking an initial report, a vehicle recovery, and any camera use in between, and that building one for the 60-day test period was itself a heavy lift that would likely require additional clerical staff to sustain. Assistant Chief Mason added that Flock is one of about a dozen investigative tools detectives use on any given case, making it hard to say a case was solved by camera data alone rather than aided by it. McKee was unmoved: "We need to figure out if it's worth the cost, and to do that we need to have a number of information about the crimes you're solving with it." She asked the department to come back with a proposal for tracking outcomes going forward.
On one specific case in the 60-day sample, a criminal-tampering investigation into who had been vandalizing anti-panhandling signs, the department and the committee could not agree on a basic count: the audit report put Flock's role in the case at 14 searches, TPD's own recount put it at 32 or 33, the committee's independent count came to 79, and one summary figure floated as high as 90. Criminal tampering is a misdemeanor, not a felony. Asked whether it was an appropriate use of the tool, Chief DeWolf said, "I'll leave that up to you."
A committee member who reviews vendor security audits professionally walked through Flock's 92-page SOC 2 report (a standard data-security audit), obtained since the last Public Safety meeting. Several findings stood out to them. The audit covers only Flock's cloud platform, not the cameras, their firmware, or how data moves from camera to cloud, a gap they said most non-technical readers would miss entirely. Flock's off-boarding process contains no written commitment about what happens to a customer's data after a subscription ends. A customer that shortens its retention period only affects data collected going forward; anything already stored rides out the old retention clock. The word "AI" does not appear anywhere in the report despite AI's role in the system. And in a career spent reviewing "hundreds of SOC reports from hundreds of vendors," they said Flock is the only company that requires requesters to already know a Flock employee's email address to get approved for the report, the only one that won't let the report be downloaded as a PDF, and the only one whose report has no page numbers at all, making it impossible to cite a specific finding. Most companies' SOC 2 reports carry one or two documented exceptions where practice doesn't match policy; Flock's report, they said, had more exceptions than they had ever seen from any vendor, though they noted a non-disclosure agreement bars them from saying how many.
The only technical question for TPD: what integrations exist between Flock and other city systems. Chief DeWolf said the sole integration is with Axon in-car cameras, and that it currently runs one-directional, from Axon into Flock, though it has been temporarily paused as Axon builds a competing product of its own. Axon's own dashcam and license-plate data, separate from Flock, is stored on Axon's servers and also purged after 30 days.
McKee asked the department to clarify recent news that Flock is changing its default retention window from 30 days to 7. Chief DeWolf confirmed the 7-day default applies to new Flock contracts; existing customers, including Troy, can set their own retention period, and some agencies nationally keep data a year or more. Asked his opinion of the change, Chief DeWolf said 7 days is too short, pointing to sexual assault cases where victims may not report for four or five days, and said he'd support something closer to a 21-day standard some agencies have adopted instead. "These are people," he said. "These are victims that we need to help find justice for. It's not a toy."
Chief DeWolf spent several minutes urging the committee to reconsider a provision of the pending Local Law 3 that would bar Flock use for misdemeanor investigations. He read from a list of roughly 30 misdemeanors the department considers serious, including third-degree assault, sexual misconduct, criminal obstruction of breathing, custodial interference, obstructing governmental administration, criminal contempt tied to protective orders, and endangering the welfare of a child, and argued that officers often don't know at the scene whether a case will turn out to be a misdemeanor or escalate into a felony. By the time it's reclassified, he said, the 30-day window may have already closed. A committee member countered that the department had not shown it could not solve those cases without Flock data; Chief DeWolf agreed it "might be able to," but called the tool "a huge help" in many of them.
McKee, addressing the department directly on Local Law 3's broader intent, said the council was trying to balance the tool's usefulness against Fourth Amendment protections at a moment when "people's awareness of their rights being attacked is heightened," citing concerns about voting rights and immigration enforcement locally. On the law's enforcement and liability provisions, Corporation Counsel indicated the exposure falls on a plaintiff's claim against an individual officer's misuse, not on the city itself, unless harm is proven. The committee indicated it will amend rather than abandon Local Law 3. No votes were taken; the working session adjourned, and Local Law 3 itself was pulled from the evening's Finance Committee agenda so the council could weigh what it had just heard.
Finance Meeting called to order at 6:44 p.m. All seven members present. In attendance: Mayor Carmella Mantello, Deputy Mayor Seamus Donnelly, Commissioner of General Services Joe Mazzariello, Corporation Counsel Richard Morrissey, Comptroller Michael McNeff, Treasurer and Head of Finance and Personnel Gabrielle Mahoney, Communications Director Alex Horton. Approximately 25 members of the public attended.
Because Local Law 3 was pulled from the agenda after the Public Safety Committee session, the evening's Finance agenda opened with Local Law 4 instead.
Frankie thanked Council Member Struber for what she called an "airtight, comprehensive" Local Law 4 and voiced full support. HG Wonder, who lives downtown, also backed Local Law 4 and pressed a separate point: the city has been under a state of emergency since April 1 without a clear public explanation of what justifies it. She said the mayor has blocked her online, cutting off one of her main channels for information, and that she was "alarmed" to see AI-generated videos of Council Member McKee circulating on a Troy city official's Facebook page before realizing they weren't real.
Local Law 4 repeals and replaces Section C-40 of the city charter, "Public Emergencies," to align it with New York State Executive Law Article 2-B's standards for declaring a state of emergency. Council Member Struber, the sponsor, laid out a comparison of emergency declarations across the region: the current Troy mayor has declared eight states of emergency since taking office in January 2024. Binghamton's mayor, in office since 2022, has declared two, both for snowstorms. Syracuse's current mayor, in office since December 2025, has declared none; that mayor's predecessor declared two over seven years. Kingston's mayor, in office more than a decade, has declared three, one for COVID-19. Albany's current mayor, in office since January 2026, has declared none; the prior 11-year administration declared 17, with the COVID-19 emergency alone renewed monthly 16 times under state law.
"Troy has a suspiciously high number of emergency declarations that has cost the city money," Struber said, arguing that writing the state's existing legal standard directly into Troy's own charter makes it harder to bypass. "If defining a process causes an executive to assume that their power is being curtailed, that is a good indication that they may have been misusing the spirit and intent of that statute."
Local Law 4 passed 7-0.
Ordinance 31 would add battery energy storage systems to Chapter 285 of the city code. Struber offered floor amendments: defining a Tier 1 battery as under 600 kilowatt-hours, adding business, multifamily, and two-family zoning districts to the list of eligible zones, and raising the required emergency operations fund from 1% to 10%. The amendment passed 7-0.
Before a vote on the amended ordinance, Corporation Counsel told the council it could not act on the legislation at all: adding battery storage to the zoning code is a Type I action under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), requiring the council to formally declare itself lead agency, notify all involved agencies, wait 30 days, and complete a full environmental assessment before voting, in addition to a required referral to the county planning board. Struber said she had asked Corporation Counsel for this process by email on several occasions and gotten no clear answer; Corporation Counsel said he had responded to what was asked. Council President Steele called it a "communication problem" and asked Corporation Counsel to put the SEQRA steps in writing for the full council. Council Member Spain-McLaren moved to table, seconded by Favreau; the motion passed 7-0.
The committee also advanced eleven more ordinances and four resolutions, from routine budget amendments to a $650,000 bond for public works equipment and an honorary street designation for "Kevin Pryor Way." Council Member Campbell-Cohen asked the administration to specify, going forward, exactly which fund is being drawn on whenever an ordinance appropriates fund balance as new revenue. A council member asked whether new public works trucks funded by the bond would have backup cameras; the administration agreed to add that to the spec. A proposed change of traffic direction on Jacob Street was tabled after Council Member Spain-McLaren cited a volume of resident concerns needing follow-up. Full details are in the vote table below.
The council heard the comptroller's second-quarter financial report, required by charter Section 45-3 to arrive by July 31. As Council President Steele noted at the August 6 Regular Meeting, the mayor had called that deadline "outdated" even though Mantello herself wrote the specific dates into the code as council president in 2018. The report finally landed tonight, three weeks late.
Mayor Mantello opened with an overview: the city remains under budget across all expenditure funds, with contractual expenses down more than $300,000 from last year. In July, Troy received S&P Global's highest short-term bond rating, SP-1+, which Comptroller McNeff confirmed is not an upgrade but the top tier the agency offers. The mayor credited the rating with helping make possible the new Lansingburgh firehouse and continued infrastructure investment, and said the city's $42 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, spread across more than 70 projects, will be fully spent by December 31. She also pointed to the first-ever reduction in the annual garbage fee and, for the first time in decades, a citywide free at-home bulk pickup program that replaced the prior model of extra Amnesty Day drop-offs.
Council members worked through the report page by page:
Special Meeting called to order at 8:26 p.m. All seven members present. In attendance: Mayor Mantello, Deputy Mayor Seamus Donnelly, Corporation Counsel Richard Morrissey, Comptroller Michael McNeff, Treasurer and Head of Finance and Personnel Gabrielle Mahoney, Communications Director Alex Horton. Approximately 15 members of the public attended. Meeting adjourned at 9:00 p.m.
Four ordinances already recommended by the Finance Committee returned for final adoption. All four passed 7-0.
On the ordinance appropriating American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, Council Member Favreau, a member of the ARPA steering committee, said she had personally brought forward seven or eight smaller resident-proposed projects but that time was too short to complete every required step before the December 31 spending deadline that would otherwise send the money back to the federal government. The committee instead funded two projects to make sure every dollar gets spent: improvements at North Lake, outside her own district but heavily used, and a Fair Park neighborhood project. Council Member Spain-McLaren, who said she has lived in the Fair Park neighborhood her whole life, thanked the committee. Favreau said she looks forward to further discussion of a North Lake pavilion at next month's General Services Committee meeting.
Council President Steele waived the usual per-item speaking limit and opened the floor. Eight residents spoke, all about Flock and the camera audit.
Jim Mouts of District 5 said he trusted his neighbors' close reading of the audit data more than the department's framing of it. What the numbers show him, he said, is surveillance, not safety: "My stand on this is simply, get the flock out of Troy."
Francis Sweet of District 6 said she went in skeptical that TPD's own self-collected data would hold up, and that instead "most of the important information is just missing." TPD's stated justification for longer retention, that some cases aren't reported for 48 hours, didn't match its own numbers: 96% of incidents were reported within 48 hours, yet TPD itself searched plates within that same 48-hour window only 64% of the time. "The lag seems to be on the department side, not the public's," she said. None of the 30 sample cases TPD provided included outcome data showing how many were actually solved, or how many relied on plate data as crucial evidence. She cited Atlanta, where 5,000 Flock cameras solve only 10% of motor vehicle crime, and FBI data showing Troy's motor-vehicle-theft solve rate has stayed low every year since it got Flock cameras: 21 vehicles stolen at 2024's high with 2 solved, 3 stolen in January 2026's low with 1 solved, and more cases solved in February 2020, before Flock arrived, than in any month since. She also pushed back on Flock's headline-grabbing retention announcement: the company changed only its recommended default from 30 to 7 days, not a mandatory floor, so 30-day retention remains available with a few extra clicks.
Evelyn Sy of District 3 pointed to Council Member McKee's memo supporting Local Law 3, which cites the 2018 Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States on cell-phone location tracking. She paired that with a 7% Flock misread rate documented in Lee Schmidt v. City of Norfolk and a roughly 1-in-10 failure rate from an IPVM research study, and ran through real consequences of misreads elsewhere: a Georgia man held at gunpoint by a K-9 unit after a plate misread, resulting in a $35,000 settlement; a Tennessee couple facing drawn guns with their three-year-old granddaughter in the back seat; another couple facing the same in February with a one-month-old in the car.
Deirdre of District 4 flagged a Wired magazine report that week on Flock's new "OS Investigate" pilot, which lets an officer type a prompt combining a location, a time window, and a behavior pattern and get back a generated list of matching plates out of millions of monthly scans. She also described attending a June 9 Rensselaer County Sheriff's Office drone demonstration with Flock representatives present, where a Flock representative tapped a vehicle live on the mobile app, a white early-2000s Ford truck she recognized from her own neighborhood, and had the drone automatically begin following it. When she asked whether the interface had any built-in restriction on that kind of live tracking, the representative said no, but that Flock could build a custom restriction if a municipality passed a law requiring one. "That's up to the municipality," she said. "And they're right. So it's our role here in Troy to limit this type of technology by passing a law."
Greg Lyons thanked the council for the audit, incomplete as it is, and reviewed how Troy got here: the first Flock agreement was signed by the police department on December 19, 2021, and expanded in 2022, with no clear record of when or whether it ever came before the council. When residents raised concerns earlier this year, he said, TPD turned off national search, but the administration also declared a public emergency around the same period, overriding a council effort to table the contract. He called the first audit TPD produced "wholly incomplete" and said this one, while better, still isn't enough: Local Law 3 needs binding legislation governing both TPD and vendors like Flock, not policy promises.
Heather of District 2 said she opposes automatic license plate readers outright, but supports Local Law 3's guardrails with one exception: its allowance for searches against a "hot list," which any local, state, or federal law enforcement agency can populate without independent oversight. "I don't have any confidence at all that any existing list maintained by any law enforcement agency anywhere is not actively and intentionally racist," she said, and warned it isn't far-fetched to imagine a federally built hot list targeting transgender people or immigrants. She pointed to what she called an escalation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Troy that month, including that day, as reason the city shouldn't keep mass-surveillance data reachable by federal agencies at all.
Briana Harrington of District 4 said the audit only reinforced her view that Flock isn't necessary in Troy, calling the ratio of scans to solved cases badly out of proportion, and said she was glad the related state-of-emergency issue is being worked out.
Frankie closed the forum with a broader argument: Flock, she said, is "basically just a Netflix subscription for local law enforcement," a product the city bought and now defends instead of defending residents' constitutional rights. She cited more than 80 million private vehicle scans a year, out-of-state and federal searches numbering in the millions, and argued the administration's job is to protect residents from warrantless tracking, not to protect a vendor's sales pitch.
Votes verified against clerk's minutes (_08202026-1863).
| # | Full Title | Sponsors | Notes | Vote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LL 4 | A Local Law Amending the Charter of the City of Troy by Repealing and Replacing Section C-40 "Public Emergencies" to Align It With State of New York Executive Law Article 2-B | Struber | Reduces scope of the mayor's emergency declaration power | 7-0 |
| Ord. 31 | Ordinance Amending Chapter 285 of the Code of the City of Troy, Adding Battery Energy Storage Systems | Struber | Floor amendment (Tier 1 definition, BD/MF/TF zoning districts added, emergency fund raised to 10%) passed 7-0; tabled after Corporation Counsel said a full SEQRA review is required first | Tabled |
| Ord. 34 | Ordinance Authorizing Settlement of Claim, To Wit: Ajit K. Khanuja et al. vs. City of Troy et al., United States District Court for the Northern District of New York (Civil Action No.: 1:26-CV-1019) | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 35 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 Capital Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 36 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 General Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | Adds $1 million in revenue via appropriated fund balance; Campbell-Cohen asked for the unassigned fund balance total going forward on similar transfers | 7-0 |
| Ord. 37 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 Capital Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 38 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 Capital Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | DiLorenzo added as co-sponsor | 7-0 |
| Ord. 39 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 Capital Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 40 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 Miscellaneous Special Revenue Fund Budget to Accept Funds from the United States Department of Justice as Part of the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Grant | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 41 | Ordinance Authorizing Settlement of Claim, To Wit: Joseph Martinez vs. the City of Troy and Towers on the Hudson, Rensselaer County Supreme Court (Index No.: EF2023-273522) | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 42 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 General Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 43 | Ordinance Amending the General Fund, Capital Projects Fund and Miscellaneous Special Grants Fund Budgets to Appropriate Funding from the American Rescue Plan Act | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Ord. 44 | Ordinance Amending the General Fund, Garbage Fund, Water Fund and Sewer Fund Budgets | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Res. 82 | Resolution Determining that Proposed Action Is a Type II Action for Purposes of the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act | Steele (Admin.) | 7-0 | |
| Res. 83 | Bond Resolution of the City of Troy, New York, Authorizing the Issuance of $650,000 in Serial Bonds to Finance the Purchase of Machinery and Apparatus for Construction and Maintenance | Steele (Admin.) | Backup cameras added to new-truck spec at a council member's request | 7-0 |
| Res. 84 | Honorary Street Designation of "Kevin Pryor Way" | Steele, Spain-McLaren (Admin.) | Struber and McKee added as co-sponsors | 7-0 |
| Res. 85 | Resolution of Troy City Council Authorizing a Change of Traffic Direction on Jacob Street Between River and King Streets | Steele (Admin.) | Tabled after Spain-McLaren cited a volume of resident concerns needing follow-up | Tabled |
All items passed 7-0. All seven members present. Final adoption of ordinances previously recommended by Finance Committee. Votes verified against clerk's minutes (_08202026-1864).
| # | Full Title | Sponsors | Notes | Vote |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ord. 34 | Ordinance Authorizing Settlement of Claim, To Wit: Ajit K. Khanuja et al. vs. City of Troy et al., United States District Court for the Northern District of New York (Civil Action No.: 1:26-CV-1019) | Steele (Admin.) | Final adoption | 7-0 |
| Ord. 36 | Ordinance Amending the 2026 General Fund Budget | Steele (Admin.) | Final adoption | 7-0 |
| Ord. 41 | Ordinance Authorizing Settlement of Claim, To Wit: Joseph Martinez vs. the City of Troy and Towers on the Hudson, Rensselaer County Supreme Court (Index No.: EF2023-273522) | Steele (Admin.) | Final adoption | 7-0 |
| Ord. 43 | Ordinance Amending the General Fund, Capital Projects Fund and Miscellaneous Special Grants Fund Budgets to Appropriate Funding from the American Rescue Plan Act | Steele (Admin.) | Final adoption; funds North Lake and Fair Park neighborhood projects | 7-0 |