Orange County Freezes Ambitious Aerial Photography Project

It was an easy sell: Cops, firefighters and county planners zipping down streets and across backyards with a simple click of the mouse.

From Disneyland’s Matterhorn to the sluggish El Toro Y, the notion of photographing every square mile of Orange County with high-resolution aerial images was eagerly embraced by county leaders.

They even endorsed the concept that they could recoup the cost of the aerial mission by selling photos of neighborhoods, cul-de-sacs and industrial complexes on the Internet.

But then reality knocked.

Hundreds of residents phoned and e-mailed the county, complaining that the ambitious photo shoot smacked of Big Brother on some sort of paparazzi romp through the backyards of about 2.7 million county residents.

“We dropped the ball on this issue when we approved it,” conceded Supervisor Todd Spitzer. “There were questions I should have asked and failed to.”

Indeed, the entire two-year, $184,000 aerial shoot is now on hold while the county reviews privacy and legal issues. At issue is whether the county should contract with Rochester, N.Y.-based Pictometry International LLC, and if so, should the pictures be hawked for $15 to $25 on the county’s Web site?

Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the ACLU of Southern California, says county bureaucrats were too eager to snatch the latest in high-tech tools without weighing the social downside, such as loss of basic privacy.

“I found it rather shocking that they can have technology that can go under the eaves and in your backyards,” said Schroeder. “And if you can sell this information to private parties, you can easily sell it to burglars.

“All of us have things in our backyard that we don’t want anyone else to see.”

Supervisors acknowledged they weren’t ready for the hundreds of phones calls and e-mails that poured in after the board unanimously approved the project Sept. 19.

What makes Pictometry different from scores of other aerial products is that, rather than being taken from directly overhead, pictures are taken at an angle that--once combined with the company’s software--allows users to zoom in on neighborhoods and measure the height, width and length of any feature in an image, including gullies, buildings, trees, poles and roads.

Under terms of the contract, the company would take 60,000 photographs of the county from an airplane flying at about 4,000 feet. The images would be stored in a county database and sold to cities and governmental agencies, including police and fire departments.

Though supervisors were assured the project had been fully researched by county staff, Supervisor Jim Silva said it’s evident that questions on privacy rights, public access on the Internet and the county’s liability “still need to be addressed.”

Board Chairman Chuck Smith, a retired civil engineer, said he continues to believe in the concept and thinks it will be a money saver for county workers who deal with zoning and planning matters.

“We’ve asked for a legal review, and although we’ve given the go-ahead to do it, [the board] can limit it from being distributed on the Internet,” Smith said.

For planning purposes, the aerial imagery is perfect, said Brian F. Fitzpatrick, West Coast general manager for Pictometry. Rather than having a developer show an artist’s rendering of a new shopping plaza, the digital software allows a planner to test the developer’s claims by immediately seeing what the site will look like, he said.

Police officers would have the ability to view structures and barriers to tactical threats on a computer screen in a dispatcher’s office, in essence looking an area over until police get to the scene, said Sheriff’s Capt. Ron Wilkerson, who viewed a product demonstration.

“It’s an interim measure until a helicopter arrives,” he said. “The resolution, I thought, was outstanding, and at least it allows us to have something that we can bring up [on a screen] to get an idea of the physical layout.”

As to the concern with privacy issues, Fitzpatrick is matter-of-fact. “There is no law that says you can’t take an aerial picture or sell it.”

The county spent months reviewing the company and its products, said county officials who sent a two-person research team to New York last spring. In addition, officials said, a survey of 1,200 residents did not reveal any distaste for selling the photographs on the Internet.

Vicki Stewart, manager for fiscal programs services, said the survey showed that 70% thought it was a great idea, 26% were neutral on the matter, and only 4% didn’t like the idea.

Stewart said she understood why residents would be sensitive to a proposal involving high-tech cameras but suggested that, unlike satellite imagery as portrayed in Hollywood movies, “this is one shot in time and it gets upgraded every two years.”

But Leo Crawford, the county’s chief information officer, scoffed at allegations that aerial imaging gives viewers some special photographic ability to peek in windows and under bushes. “That’s laughable,” Crawford said. “The quality is just not there. You could probably tell if an individual is standing there, but it’s too fuzzy to note much else.”

Officials in Onondaga County in upstate New York, where Pictometry products are in use, said none of the county’s 468,000 residents has complained about an invasion of privacy.

“There are tons of towns and villages around here that will be able to use it for real property tax assessment work, and we might make it available to help site development in planning,” said Martin Ferrell, Onondaga’s communications director. “It’s a good way for people to look at the potential building site and deal with issues like wetlands and whether there’s rail service.”

But what resonates among county residents isn’t what the product can do or the number of bells and whistles, but their privacy and who will have access to the photographs.

“I’m no attorney, but it looks like this could be used by law enforcement to do a property search without the owner’s permission, a warrant or probable cause,” said Richard Lubline, an Aliso Viejo resident.

Recent Supreme Court rulings have held that aerial photographs are a “legitimate exercise” of the investigatory powers of government, said Tony Arnold, associate professor at Chapman University Law School.

“It seems to me that this is one of the areas that will be coming increasingly before the courts,” he said. “The [courts] may impose limits, for example, if it’s a swimming pool and heights of buildings--that might be reasonable. But if it captures a lot of detail and aspects of the property typically hidden from view of the public, it may cross that line in the realm of privacy.”

But county supervisors have a more practical problem, Arnold said.

“Basically, people don’t like people intruding in their privacy, which is maybe even more problematic for the county than the legal issues, especially in Orange County, which has a particular sense of privacy.”