Pottsville Gives Up on Safety Stick Parking Surveillance Cameras

Pottsville is giving up on the surveillance camera parking program.

At its June meeting, the Pottsville Parking Authority voted to decommission nine MPS Safety Sticks positioned around the city. The cameras had been in use for a little more than one year.

Municipal Parking Services Inc., the company that owns the cameras, is currently searching for a contractor to remove them.

The cameras were placed in intersections to catch vehicles parking in intersections. However, the Parking Authority says the nine cameras only got about one violation per day since they were initiated.

MPS and the Parking Authority agreed to several extensions of the program in recent months but in the end, the owners decided that the cameras were not creating enough revenue in Pottsville to make them sustainable.

The Parking Authority says it will keep the signs placed near the cameras to continue to act as a deterrent for people thinking of parking in an intersection where cameras used to be. Parking in those locations carries a $35 fine.

“The city has more law-abiding vehicle operators than nearly any other city using the program in the nation,” the Parking Authority says in a statement on the conclusion of the Safety Stick experiment.

Safety Sticks are still used in Tamaqua.

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