Orange County Board Decides Not to Sell Aerial Photos

Bowing to privacy concerns, county supervisors agreed Tuesday not to offer the public a chance to buy the high-detail, digital photographs that will be taken during an aerial photo shoot of the entire county.

County officials had considered selling the photos, a block-by-block sweep of the county, on the Internet to help defray the cost of the photo missions.

“I think residents can rest assured that there won’t be any pictures, any Big Brother efforts in the county,” said Supervisor Tom Wilson, before all five supervisors voted to approve a $184,000 contract for Pictometry LLC, a New York-based corporation.

Originally, the company won approval to fly over Orange County and take 60,000 photographs at an altitude of 4,000 feet. The images would be stored in a county database and sold to cities and governmental agencies, including police and fire departments.

To recoup its costs, the county was going to make photographs available for sale on the county’s Web site for $15 to $25.

Supervisors reevaluated their decision after receiving hundreds of complaints from residents that their privacy was being invaded or that the photos would be used by criminals such as burglars.

As a result, supervisors modified Pictometry’s contract so it would not include selling photographs to the public.

The idea of having “Big Brother” peer into her backyard with a camera frightened Helen Pegausch of Santa Ana. She felt strongly enough to miss work Tuesday to talk with supervisors

“I tell you, having the county take photographs and then handing them over to cities so they can check [for violations] really bothers me,” Pegausch said. “We are paying more and more in taxes and voting out more and more of our rights.”

Pastor Wiley Drake, an outspoken cleric on property rights issues, urged the supervisors to reconsider whether the county needed such a project.

“Is there a legitimate need for this type of photography?” Drake asked.

Pictometry is different from other aerial products because rather than being taken from directly overhead, pictures are taken at an angle that, 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.

It makes the product perfect for county planners, said Brian F. Fitzpatrick, West Coast general manager for Pictometry, who was elated with the board’s decision.

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 would look like, he said.