A Denver City Council committee voted Wednesday to advance a proposed contract to replace the city’s current provider of automated license plate reading cameras.

After a week-long delay, members of the Denver City Council’s Health and Safety Committee voted 5-2 to send the 12-month, $150,000 contract with Arizona-based camera vendor Axon to the full City Council on Monday.

The nuts and bolts of the deal include 50 fixed ALPR cameras that can be deployed on poles, trailers, or buildings, along with the solar panels, batteries and software to support the system.

Councilmembers Sarah Parady and Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez cast the two dissenting votes.

The new deal with Axon comes after months of tension between Mayor Mike Johnston and the City Council over mounting privacy concerns with The Flock Group, and how license plate data could be shared or misused.

City officials note that the biggest difference between Flock and Axon is that Axon offers the city a “closed system” for its data, meaning that there’s not a national data-sharing feature like Flock.

Outside agencies would not be able to query Denver’s database and requests for license plate data from the city would have to be made by telephone or email and vetted by Denver officials for compliance with state and local laws before release.

Although still in a “draft” form, the contract lays out tighter controls protecting the city’s data. But for some committee members, it still leaves the city vulnerable to data compromise.

While Councilmember Paul Kashmann, who is not a voting member of the committee, lauded city officials for their work tightening contract language, he told Tim Hoffman, policy director for Johnston’s office, that evolving federal headwinds could pose challenges.

“I’m just living in the same world you are, where we’re very rapidly seeing behaviors coming out of the federal government that we’ve never seen before, and we’re barely halfway into this particular administration,” Kashmann said. 

Kashmann added: “I think it’s a dream to think that we can protect our information. We can provide a few hoops that they’ve got to jump through, whether it be warrants, subpoenas, or any other legal procedure, but if they want data that we collect, they’re going to get data that we collect.” 

Johnston, as well as Denver Chief of Police Ron Thomas, have long advocated for keeping the license plate reading cameras, arguing for their contributions to reducing crime in the city.

City officials said that once the new contract is approved, efforts to remove the current Flock cameras would begin as soon as possible.

The next stop for the contract will be Monday at the regular Denver City Council meeting, where a special one-hour courtesy public hearing will take place.