By Mary O’KEEFE

The Glendale City Council voted to approve a resolution requested by the Glendale Police Dept. to use Axon Enterprise Inc. as its integrated technology ecosystem. The integrated technology ecosystem brings together several technology services used by police departments including drones, interview cameras tasers and the technology app evidence.com. Evidence.com will allow the department to share information with partners like the cities of Pasadena and Burbank, the Los Angeles County Sheriffs’ Dept. and LA Police Dept. and LA County District Attorney.

This resolution will be used to upgrade several technological advancements including body-worn cameras and adding more of those cameras. It will also add license plate reader technology that will be in all 91 police vehicles. This technology will support Flock Safety cameras that are already placed throughout the City. Flock Safety cameras use automatic license plate recognition technology that can read the plates of passing vehicles. Flock cameras are stationary.

The cost of this resolution is $873,166 for this year, and the costs for future years will be placed within the GPD budget.

Regarding the forming of a human relations coalition, the majority of the Council was not in favor of having this coalition being part of the City agency but tended to move toward a more volunteer organization like a similar coalition in Burbank. The Council voiced its hope that this coalition would be community-based with residents’ input. Mayor Dan Brotman spoke of the importance of creating an organization where people can have difficult conversations in a “safe place.” He added it is important to let people know that the City will have their back when facing issues like hate speech.

Staff will look at forming a human relations coalition and reach out to local organizations to see how they can support it.

Then the discussion went to the dogs.

Council heard information on the Dog Park Feasibility Study where information had been collected both in person and online. There are 5,000 active dog licenses within the City of Glendale, and the majority of those surveyed stated they take their dogs to dog parks to run and socialize; most visited Griffith Park.

There were three areas presented for placement of a dog park including Brand Park, Palmer Park, Lot 11 (a parking lot across from the Armenian American Museum location) and the Garfield Campus/Glendale Community College (GCC). The City is looking at areas with at least one acre available for the park.

The staff reported that they have reached out to the college but did not get a positive response; however, it would like to take the issue back. This location rose to the top of the other suggestions because many other parks have a lot of community gardens and are heavily visited, like Brand Park where a lot of activities are held.

Councilmember Ardy Kassakhian made a motion to have staff move ahead with a focus on communicating with GCC concerning using the Garfield Campus, to review having a smaller, temporary dog park at Palmer Park and have the staff continue to look for more options for a dog park within the City.

The motion was approved.