AI garbage truck cameras pulled from Huntsville’s proposed budget

Artificial intelligence cameras will not be attached to garbage trucks – looking for overgrown and neglected property – in Huntsville for the foreseeable future.

That is because the city has pulled a proposed contract from a company that would afix them to the trucks from the Fiscal 2026 budget. The budget and the proposed three-year, $972,200 contract with City Detect were to be voted on at the Huntsville City Council’s Sept. 25 meeting. City Detect is a company that provides an AI-powered software platform designed to identify potential code violations and public works issues.

“Quite frankly, we need to educate people a little bit better on it,” Mayor Tommy Battle said during Thursday’s council meeting. “We need to let people know exactly what it’s going to do, what the ramifications are, what the propensity is for their ability to actually take pictures with it, what exactly they are taking pictures of and how tightly we’re going to be able to hold on with that information.”

Battle said several things in the contract needed to be tweaked. The mayor said the city would be working on the contract over the next six to eight months.

Council President John Meredith said the council will still need to vote to remove the contract from the agenda at the Sept. 25 meeting. He also praised residents who opposed the contract in making their voices heard.

Several residents voiced their opposition again to the contract during Thursday’s meeting. Geoff Angle thanked the mayor for pulling the contract but voiced concerns the council might vote to approve the contract sooner than the six to eight months the mayor suggested.

He urged opponents to keep an eye on future council agendas for when the contract might come back up again.

According to the city’s website, the proposed system works by mounting cameras on city garbage trucks, which already travel every street on a regular schedule. The cameras collect visual data from public rights-of-way, and advanced AI tools then analyze the images to identify concerns such as overgrown grass, graffiti, illegal dumping and property neglect.

If a contract is approved, City Administrator John Hamilton said at an earlier meeting there would be no automatic citations or fines associated with the system and no enforcement bots.

Hamilton said the system would simply gather visual data as garbage trucks go about their routes. That footage would then be reviewed by city departments such as Community Development and Public Works. If something appeared problematic based on the City Detect data, a human inspector would take a more informed, closer look, just like they would today under current procedures.

Community Development is the city department that enforces ordinances involving overgrown grass and other property neglect issues.