NORTHAMPTON — Nearly 200 people have signed a petition asking the City Council to override Mayor David Narkewicz’s veto of its anti-downtown surveillance ordinance.
“We strongly support and have been advocating for the City Council ordinance,” said Jessica Johnson, a historian employed by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who has been one of many agitating against the expansion of municipal surveillance in the downtown area.
Wednesday, the debate over restricting surveillance technology downtown may very well reach its crescendo.
At 5 p.m., the City Council will meet to address the mayor’s veto of its ordinance. The council is obliged to act on a veto, formally known as a disapproval, within 30 days of receiving it.
While the council was originally set to take up the ordinance on Jan. 4, that meeting was canceled due to weather, and the next regular council meeting falls just outside the necessary window.
The date and time for the meeting was determined by newly elected council President Ryan O’Donnell, who said it was designed to be a day that would work for the greatest number of councilors, a challenge he characterized as a “difficult puzzle to solve.”
The ordinance would forbid fixed, municipally operated surveillance technology in the Central Business District. Exceptions for cameras monitoring parking areas, cameras used in ongoing, time-limited criminal investigations, cameras used in emergency situations and cameras on the police station are included in the ordinance. All other cameras on land owned, controlled or leased by the city that are deployed in a fixed location for more than a day would be forbidden.
Accompanying his veto, Narkewicz proposed changes to the ordinance that would allow him to support it.
Among these changes are restricting fixed surveillance technology citywide, increasing exceptions to include all cameras that monitor municipal buildings, and switching out language in the ordinance to replace prohibition with restriction. It also outlines a formal process in which new cameras could be approved.
“A lot of what the mayor proposed is very worthy,” O’Donnell said. “Some of it needs improvement.”
The council has determined that it will have to take up the issue of the veto with the original language of the ordinance intact. Should it wish to pass the mayor’s ordinance instead, it will have to go through a separate legislative process. This was determined after getting legal advice from the city’s attorney.
The mayor has had a number of conversations with the ordinance’s three sponsors, O’Donnell being one of them.
Both O’Donnell and Narkewicz said the conversations have been good, although no agreement has been reached on amended language.
“My hope is that we could find common ground,” Narkewicz said, although he said he respects the process should this not occur.
Overriding the veto would take a two-thirds vote of the City Council, which translates as a vote of 6-3 or greater in favor of the override. The ordinance passed by a 7-1 vote on its first reading and a 7-2 vote on its second.
However, surveillance opponents aren’t certain that they have the votes to override the veto. They are encouraging people who support the ordinance to show up at the meeting, post on social media and lobby their councilors, as well as the city council at large.
Ordinance supporters are also circulating a petition, to be presented to the council at the meeting, supporting the override of the veto. As of Tuesday afternoon it had 186 signatures, a number of whom have comments attached to them.
The petition opposes the mayor’s changes to the ordinance over the process for approving cameras, the exception for municipal buildings and for not having a sunset provision/reauthorization process for cameras.
Dana Goldblatt, a local attorney and anti-surveillance activist, also noted that the municipal building exception that the mayor is proposing would allow for cameras to be placed on City Hall.
Asked about the camera approval process, Narkewicz said he modeled it after the public hearing requirements for budgetary and capital matters as outlined in the charter. He said it would insure that new cameras could not be approved quickly.
The mayor’s ordinance would require at least a 14-day notice of a public hearing on the deployment of new surveillance technology, following the publication in a newspaper of the hearing time and information on where people could find details of the proposal. It would then need to be approved by a vote of the City Council, with O’Donnell and Narkewicz saying that this would likely involve two votes, as does most council business.
O’Donnell said the approval process put forward by the mayor takes the power away from the City Council on the issue, though he said the mayor has been open to addressing this.
Under the City Council’s vetoed ordinance, surveillance technology not conforming to the ordinance could be approved via another ordinance. Narkewicz said that such a process could put a change on a council meeting agenda with far less notice, while O’Donnell said that such a change would have to be referred to committee and voted on twice.
O’Donnell said he wished the mayor had weighed in on the ordinance earlier.
“We would have welcomed his comments,” he said.
Narkewicz noted that he has consistently opposed the ordinance as unnecessary, as the City Council already has the ability to sink new surveillance technology by not funding it. However, once it passed, he said he wanted to find common ground.
“I was not offering a separate ordinance,” he said. “I was offering revisions.”
The mayor said he did not know whether or not he would be at Wednesday’s council meeting, and that such a decision would depend on his discussions with councilors, and whether his presence was desired.
The debate over municipally operated surveillance technology downtown was started in September, after Police Chief Jody Kasper brought forward the idea of installing additional municipally operated cameras there. This provoked a strong negative response, including the drafting and release of the first version of the ordinance.
Bera Dunau can be reached at bdunau@gazettenet.com