The City of Penticton is going to be adding more cameras to the lakeshore to expand public surveillance to protect its assets.

At the meeting today, May 19, city council approved a plan to spend $65,000 to add more cameras to the city’s own CCTV system as well as the Chamber of Commerce’s camera system along Lakeshore Drive.

The city’s public safety manager Julie Czeck said the cameras would only be accessed by the city or police in the case of an investigation.

“We’ve been very thoughtful about ensuring that the scope of the surveillance component of the strategy is in alignment with privacy legislation,” she told council in the meeting. “The city is the only people that are able to access any footage from city-owned CCTV cameras.”

The city is going to put cameras to watch the pump stations, the Peach area, the Jubilee Pavilion, SS Sicamous and public washrooms. Since 2021, the city has spent around $400,000 repairing vandalism and damage to those waterfront assets.

“It’s like clockwork every year. We have tourists come to our community and we get the emails, ‘I’ve came, I enjoyed your market, everything’s lovely. My grandmother or my mother, we couldn’t get to your washroom because they were closed,’” councillor Ryan Graham said. “We are spending an exorbitant amount every year just maintaining our assets.”

The cameras are part of a larger initiative to make Lakeshore Drive safer since emergency calls for service have been steadily increasing since 2019, accounting for up to 10 per cent of total RCMP calls for service each year.

There is a plan to spend a total of $150,000 adding more security cameras to the city’s surveillance system.

Czeck said there will be more public safety investments to come for the waterfront areas.

“It needs to be a comprehensive strategy and the CCTV is only one strand of that strategy,” she said.