Florida-based foundation is behind $100k donation for Seaside crime cameras.

If the streets of Seaside become safer in the coming years, local residents might have a foundation based in Florida to thank for it.

At the Seaside City Council meeting on Jan. 16, Seaside Police Chief Vicki Myers told the city council about her hope of installing eight to ten surveillance cameras throughout Seaside that would be funded by an “anonymous” donation of $100,000. All she needed was the council’s approval to install the cameras and accept the donation.

The council gave it unanimously in successive 7-0 votes.

Some local residents in attendance spoke favorably of the idea during public comments. But just as many spoke against it, viewing the cameras as yet another government intrusion into their privacy. One resident speculated that the money came from Google. Another said, “Free money can be dangerous.”

But according to documents obtained by the Weekly via a Public Records Request filed the day after the meeting, the donor of the money appears far from dangerous: the $100,000 came from the Dunspaugh-Dalton Foundation (DDF), a Coral Gables, Fla. organization that gives out charitable grants to a variety of agencies, including a number in Monterey County.

Leslie Buchanan, one of three DDF trustees, says the foundation’s donations to Monterey-area agencies can be attributed to a local connection: trustee Sarah Bonner, who has been serving in that role since 1972, lives in Pebble Beach.

“FREE MONEY CAN BE DANGEROUS.”

“Our concentration is in Miami-Dade,” Buchanan says, “but we have a long history of giving in the northern California and Monterey area.” The request for anonymity, she adds, came because “[the foundation is] not looking for any particular type of recognition.”

The list of local agencies the foundation awarded grants to in 2011 is long and varied – including Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the Boys and Girls Club, SpectorDance and the Carmel Mission Foundation. According to DDF’s tax return that year, local grants add up to more than $150,000.

“We have impacts on the crime situation, directly or indirectly,” Buchanan says. “Sarah’s been working with people in the community for some time to find ways to have a positive impact. One of the focuses we’ve had would be to look at how we could reduce the crime that’s been happening that area.”

In the grant application Myers sent to DDF, the police chief frames the need for the cameras around rising gang violence in Seaside. “Many of these gang members are believed to be drop-outs from the Salinas Norteños and Sureños moving to Seaside and re-grouping,” she writes. “Successive generations… also remain in Seaside, and the Oriental Boys, an Asian gang heavily involved in gun trafficking, has been involved in recent gun violence.”

Myers then goes on to describe the camera system (called Spacio-Temporal Event Management Architecture cameras, or STEMA) as she did in front of the city council: The cameras will record 24 hours a day. If criminal activity is reported, authorized personnel will be able to review the recorded information by location, date and time.

“This is a fixed camera,” Councilman Ian Oglesby said during the meeting. “If you go down the road, it sees you. It’s not surveiling you. You ain’t that special.”