Capitola, Calif., a coastal town south of Santa Cruz, is getting a little more serious about lowering the number of false alarms its emergency services respond to.
The city's council is highly likely to impose a new alarm ordinance next week with an increase in fines for businesses that produce false alarms.
The likely increase is that a commercial alarm system owner would be fined $100 on the third false alarm (the first two false alarms are free). The ordinance will likely implement a regular increase per false alarm. According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper, the ordinance originally would have also included a fine structure for residential alarms, but that has apparently been taken off the table.
A report in the newspaper also indicated that the town of Capitola is the only in Santa Cruz County that has not yet implemented an alarm ordinance.