Clinton Fire and Police departments receive grants to upgrade equipment

CLINTON — Selectmen voted Tuesday to accept grants that will allow the Clinton Fire and Police departments to upgrade equipment.

The Fire Department has been awarded a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant of more than $65,000, Chief Travis Leary said. The grant has a 5% match, which means the town will pay about $3,100 from an equipment reserve fund.

The Fire Department expects to use the money to pay for a cascade system that allow firefighters to refill their air tanks, Leary said. The department has had to go to Fairfield or Waterville to refill its tanks.

“This was a definite need, but not a cheap one, so we approached it on the grant angle,” Leary told selectmen.

The Police Department has received two smaller grants, Chief Stanley “Rusty” Bell said. One is a $3,600 federal grant for body cameras, the other about $1,000 that the department receives every year.

Bell said he plans to use both grants to upgrade the Police Department’s body camera systems.

“We want to combine the two to use the funds to put our body camera situation in a really good place, and take the same technology and put it in our vehicles, because we are just using less-than-desirable cameras in our vehicles,” he said Tuesday.

At the end of last year, the Police Department switched to using department-issued Android cellphones with a body camera app from Silicon Valley-based Visual Labs Inc. The app allows officers to easily start recording and automatically upload to the department’s database, where video can be viewed by administrators, including Bell.

He said Visual Labs offers a kit to integrate the system into police vehicles, which includes a feature that automatically starts recording when an officer turns on the flashing lights and siren.

The Police Department pays a monthly cost for the data management. Bell said any additional funds could go toward covering that expense.