BATON ROUGE — Following a lengthy discussion Wednesday night, the Metro Council pulled a proposal from its agenda that would have deployed artificial intelligence to identify blight across East Baton Rouge Parish.

The initiative, called City Detect, proposed mounting cameras on five city-parish vehicles to record street-level images similar to Google Street View. AI software would then analyze those images for signs of blight, flagging potential issues for city staff to review and open case files. The Department of Development has spent months considering the technology, citing its success in other cities.

"We could better anticipate things, see the deterioration as it’s happening instead of waiting so long for someone to call it in," Rachael Lambert, director of the Department of Development, said.

While proponents hoped the software would shift the city to a proactive model, council members expressed skepticism over the $549,000, three-year price tag, especially given the city’s struggle to resolve existing violations.

"I’m going to ask that we put the money toward picking the blight up instead of detecting more blight that we can’t pick up," Councilman Darryl Hurst said, referencing a backlog of nearly $3 million intended for blight remediation.

The city-parish currently employs seven blight outreach workers who photograph and log issues. Between January and early September 2026, the team reported 985 violations involving junk, debris, and overgrown lots. Earning $24,000 each per year, the team costs roughly $168,000 annually—roughly the same as the proposed technology’s annual price.

Some council members argued that human workers are sufficient.

"We don’t need the equipment to do that; we already have people who do that," Councilman Brandon Noel said.

Lambert countered that human outreach workers do not catch every violation and that automated tracking could significantly boost early detection.

For now, the proposal remains shelved. The city will continue relying on its human outreach team while exploring whether its waste management contractor might assist with monitoring—a request the vendor has so far declined.