Clearwater County

Volunteers have mapped 5 devices in Clearwater County: 5 license plate readers, all of them at Orofino. Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on all 5. None of them names an operator.

The readers belong to the county. The Orofino Police Chief told the City Council so in May 2026, after residents raised concerns, and the county’s Board of County Commissioners does not publish its minutes. There is no published record anywhere of who approved them, when, from whom, or for how much.

We read every meeting record the Orofino City Council publishes, April 2018 to September 2026, and everything of the county’s that survives in the Internet Archive, which is nineteen agendas from 2021, three of them the Planning and Zoning Commission’s, and three sets of Board minutes from 2011.

The plate readers have an owner and no decision

On 10 February 2026 the Orofino Police Chief mentioned, in one line of a departmental report, a county-installed license plate reader on Highway 7. On 26 May 2026 he came back to the subject at length. He told the Council that the cameras are not video surveillance systems, do not record live video, do not use artificial intelligence and do not monitor pedestrians, that they capture still images of plates and vehicle descriptions only, and that shortly after installation the system had helped locate a stolen vehicle connected to felony suspects. Then he said the cameras are owned and operated by Clearwater County, not the City of Orofino, and that all data is automatically deleted after 30 days.

That is the fullest published description of this program, and it comes from an agency that does not run it. The Board of County Commissioners meets every Monday at the courthouse in Orofino and publishes no minutes at all. Its own Minutes page carries no documents and one instruction: contact the Commissioners Office or the Clerk for a copy. No camera and no plate reader appears in the twenty-two Board documents we could read, and the years the cameras were bought are not published on any host.

Idaho has governed plate readers by statute since 1 July 2025. The law limits what they may be used for, requires training and access logs, and requires the agency to audit those logs twice a year. It sets no limit on how long the data may be kept. The 30 days the Chief described is the county’s own choice and no county document states it. Clearwater County’s plate readers has both sets of minutes and the statute.

Everything else in this county reached the record as a report

Orofino’s City Council publishes a full record, and every surveillance decision in it arrived inside something else.

The police department’s body cameras, Tasers and training simulator were settled in a July 2023 budget workshop as a five year Axon package: seven cameras, replaced twice over the term. The minutes put the commitment at $60,000 over five years. Three adopted city budgets carry the same item as $16,000 a year for five years. Both figures are the city’s own. Orofino’s Axon body cameras and Tasers has the workshop and the budget lines.

In February 2026 the Council voted, on a motion and a roll call, to give one of the department’s spare body cameras to the city’s Building Official, contingent on the City Attorney’s advice. That is one of the few camera decisions in this county that ever carried its own vote. The minutes state no licensing cost and name no policy.

And in June 2021 the Fire Chief announced that a camera system would go into the city park, in the same report as an order for more No Smoking signs, after a cigarette set fire to the bark under the playground. Two months later the police report described those cameras as a live feed to officers’ computers and phones, from which an officer had already taken pictures for a case. Orofino’s park cameras has both reports.

What is not here

The Clearwater County Sheriff’s Office is the county’s law enforcement agency and almost nothing of what it has bought is readable. The Atlas of Surveillance records a $1,493 Bureau of Justice Assistance microgrant to the office for three body-worn cameras, under the 2022 Small, Rural, Tribal Body-Worn Camera microgrant program, from that program’s own list of recipients. No county document we read confirms it.

The City of Pierce has no website of its own that we could find, and no council record to read. The City of Weippe publishes 2026 and no camera term appears in any of it. The Clearwater Tribune, the only newspaper published inside the county and the paper that prints the Commissioners’ weekly agenda, is closed to this project.

What holds this county together is a gap. The city that publishes everything owns almost none of the surveillance, and the county that owns it publishes nothing. A resident who wants to know what the five cameras on their streets cost, who can search them, and what rule governs a search has to ask the County Clerk for a copy of a meeting’s minutes, one meeting at a time.