PALM COAST, Fla. — A new drone program in Palm Coast is helping city employees be more efficient and save tax payers money.

  • Palm Coast now has three drones, dedicated team to fly them
  • Drones are slated to help a variety of departments
  • A drone has already helped the city inspect an osprey nest
  • More Flagler County coverage

After more than a year of planning and training, the city now has three drones and a dedicated team to fly them.

"It's a very useful technology for being able to capture very high resolution data that is helpful for many of the employees in our city," said Austin Kladke, a GIS specialist and one of the city's licensed drone pilots.

Despite the program just taking off last month, the drones have already been used in one project. It allowed the city to inspect an osprey nest in a tower quickly and in a way that was safer for both the inspector and the bird.

"To bring out an environmental specialist that specializes in ospreys to do that, it would have cost somewhere in the range of $1,500 to $2,000, and this drone with all the accessories and equipment and stuff like that it only cost a little less than $2,000. So essentially one project already paid for one of the drones."

Denise Bevan, a City Administration Coordinator, was excited that she was able to analyze the osprey's nest in a quick and easy way, thanks to the footage captured by the drone. She thinks the drones could help her department a lot in the future.

"A lot can be covered and assessed quickly," said Bevan. "If we have concerns, we can get out and look at things very quickly and efficiently, whereas normally you would maybe have to track through the woods for a good hour before you could actually see what needed to be assessed."

The drones are also slated to help many other departments, such as information technology, planning, communications and marketing, utility, construction management and engineering, building, and eventually the fire department.

"Right now there is only about 2 percent of municipalities in the U.S. that use drones in any capacity, and I would say yeah, we are ahead of the curve on this," Kladke said.

The next step for the program is to get more employees trained so that they can pass the required FAA test and become licensed drone pilots who can also fly for the city.