Tuscaloosa Mayor Proposes Creating Alabama’s First-Ever Drone Response Program

The meaning of "first responder" may soon shift in Tuscaloosa, where Mayor Walt Maddox is proposing the creation of a drone response team unlike anything Alabama has seen to date.

The proposal came during the mayor's Tuesday presentation of his budget recommendations to the city council, who are tasked with reviewing, discussing, editing and adopting them before Fiscal Year 2025 begins on October 1st.

The Thread will further break down Maddox's budget in later reporting, but one eye-catching proposal he made is to invest in and completely transform the way the city uses remote-controlled drones, which only grow more sophisticated each year.

Get our free mobile app

Maddox is asking the city council to spend $1.2 million to install four docking stations placed strategically across the city and outfitted with drones that can fly about 10 kilometers each. Ideally, when any municipal department needs an eye in the sky, there's one within a five-minute response time.

All the city's drone operations would be centralized under the Tuscaloosa Police Department, which would hire six new analysts to become the human element of this new team.

With his vision fully realized, Maddox said within a few years, drones could be beating the Tuscaloosa Fire Rescue service to the scene of a house fire and sending a live feed directly to a truck en route to the scene. Firefighters could be planning rescue and extinguishing operations before even parking the truck.

"Unmanned aerial systems provide us an opportunity that we've never had in this city's history," Maddox said. "Under the program that we're recommending, we would have four pod stations [...] stationed throughout the city of Tuscaloosa. Each drone, within 30 seconds to a minute of that phone call into E-911, can be launched to a situation and have an estimated time of arrival within four or five minutes. Our cyberintelligence team can then, from the air but controlled from TPD, can evaluate what is going on within that call for service and determine what assets we need to deploy and when."

The drones could also be used for crowd monitoring on UA Gamedays, Maddox said, or search-and-rescue, or in suspect tracking after pursuits.

He also proposed a number of non-police uses, like the Fire Rescue Service example above, post-disaster assessments, and easy overhead views of infrastructure including water treatment plants, city-owned roofs and the many bodies of water in the city limits.

Watch his whole presentation in the timestamped video below.

As futuristic and unmatched in the state as the program sounds, it's almost unbelievably affordable - Maddox is asking the city for a first-year investment of $1.2 million, a little less than half of which would be equipment costs and not necessarily recurring. The other $671,886 would hire the half-dozen new analysts the program requires.

Maddox also said some of those costs will be offset by savings on services the drone task force can perform that until now the city has contracted to private businesses.

The council will have the rest of August and September to weigh the proposal with the rest of the mayor's budget recommendations. For more coverage from City Hall including additional reporting from the mayor's proposal Tuesday, stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread.