Franklin County

Volunteers have mapped 8 devices in Franklin County: 8 license plate readers, all of them in Preston. No manufacturer is recorded on any of them. None of them names an operator.

Neither this county’s record nor its county seat’s contains the word Flock, the phrase license plate reader, or any plate reader vendor’s name. What they contain instead is a county that spent two years putting its own buildings, its own vehicles and its own emergency calls onto systems somebody else can watch, and a city that put cameras in its parks on grant money.

We read all 88 documents the county publishes: every agenda and every set of minutes it has posted, and its comprehensive plan. We also read 225 Preston City Council agendas and sets of minutes, 2017 through 2023.

The trackers are the biggest decision here

In October 2024 the commissioners approved a contract for location trackers on county vehicles and voted, unanimously, to have them installed. The trackers went onto the vehicles of five departments: the Sheriff, Probation, the Assessor, the ambulance service and Building Inspection. The sheriff’s dispatch center monitors all of them.

Two of those five departments enforce nothing. An assessor drives out to value a property and a building inspector drives out to inspect a site, and since October 2024 both do it with the sheriff’s dispatchers able to see where they are.

The contract was presented to the county by a sergeant from the Preston Police Department, whose own department already had trackers on ten vehicles. The item straight after it on the same agenda was the policy governing the tracking, which the City of Preston had already adopted and which was to be filed in the county personnel manual for employees to sign. The contract got a motion, a second and a vote. The policy got neither a motion nor a vote, and the county does not publish its personnel manual. GPS trackers on the county fleet has the vehicle list and both items.

The buildings went on one at a time

Franklin County never held a debate about putting its buildings under camera surveillance. It made four separate decisions to fix or extend a camera system, between January 2024 and November 2025, and at the end of them the courthouse, the juvenile services building, the ambulance building and the Robinson Building are on one platform.

The clearest account of what it is for came in February 2025. The juvenile services building’s cameras were more than ten years old, and the problem the county named was not that they had stopped recording. It was that the dispatch center could not see inside. Part of the money came from a $10,000 emergency management grant held by the county’s Civil Defense director. The same meeting bought an ID card printer so that employee badges could double as keys to the county’s doors.

The Robinson Building, added in November 2025 for $8,232.25, is a hall the public rents for events. The county buildings on one camera system has the four decisions and the prices the record states.

The Sheriff’s own cameras, and a recusal

In November 2024 the Board was offered a choice on the Sheriff’s Office camera system, which was eight years old and failing weekly: $27,786.60 to replace all of it, or $18,671.05 to replace only the computer behind it. It chose full replacement. One commissioner recused himself from the discussion and the vote, and the minutes give no reason. The same commissioner had abstained on the county’s camera bid eleven months earlier. The Sheriff’s Office camera system.

Two contracts with no numbers

The Board signed an Axon contract for the Sheriff’s body cameras and Tasers in June 2025 with no price, no term and no quantity recorded. In September 2025 it accepted a Spillman and Motorola dispatch and records subscription shared with Cache Valley, which spans the Idaho and Utah state line, with no price, no list of participating agencies and no statement of what crosses the line. Body cameras and Tasers and the dispatch subscription.

The city put cameras in its parks

Preston’s City Council authorized a grant for five cloud cameras in the city park in April 2021, after vandalism of the park restrooms, and took another grant in May 2023 to put cameras at Craner Field. That second grant came through Southeastern Idaho Public Health, the regional health district. In between, in August 2021, the Council amended the recreation chapter of the city’s comprehensive plan to add implementation of surveillance at its recreation facilities. Every vote was unanimous. Cameras in the city parks has the grants, the coverage discussion and the plan amendment.

The county also turned a camera on itself

In 2025 and 2026 the commissioners worked out how to record and publish their own meetings. A county poll drew 245 responses, 215 of them in favor. The Board bought a camera for the room, passed a policy in December 2025 and a second resolution in June 2026, and settled on posting video within 24 hours and keeping it for a year. The Clerk told them fewer than half of Idaho’s 44 counties live stream their commissioners’ meetings. It is the one camera decision in this record that a resident can use.

What the record does not hold

For every system above, the same four things are missing: a retention period, a written policy a resident can read, a list of what is covered, and in three cases a price. There is surveillance at the county’s rifle range, and no decision in the record we read approved it. In July 2025 the range’s manager asked the commissioners who to talk to for access to it, and was told to contact a commissioner or the Sheriff.

What we have not read

The eight mapped plate readers are the open question in this county, and the body most likely to have decided them is the Preston City Council. We have read that Council’s agendas and minutes through 2023 and nothing after. Through 2023 its record names no plate reader at all, and the readers appear to be more recent than that, so nothing here should be read as saying the city did or did not approve them.

The councils of Franklin, Dayton, Clifton, Weston and Oxford were not swept, and neither was the county’s planning and zoning commission or the school district, which is a separate body with its own board.