Fremont County

Volunteers have mapped 6 devices in Fremont County: 6 license plate readers, all of them inside St. Anthony. Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on all 6. None of them names an operator.

The Board of County Commissioners has no plate reader in its record, and has not had one in forty-five years. The readers belong to the county seat, and the whole published account of how St. Anthony bought them is seven words on an agenda and one sentence of minutes.

We read every meeting record both bodies publish: the county’s from 1981 to 8 September 2026, and St. Anthony’s from 2017, along with the city’s resolutions, public notices and municipal code.

The plate readers arrived as “Safety Cameras”

On 9 October 2025 the St. Anthony City Council’s agenda carried the line “Open Budget for Safety Cameras – Action Item”, between surplusing two speed trailers and confirming an airport manager. The minutes record a motion to open the budget to purchase security cameras, passing four votes to nothing. No vendor, no price, no camera count, no location, and no mention of license plates.

The word Flock reaches the Council’s record eight months later, in a department report, when the Chief asked whether anyone had questions about the Flock cameras and said the system had helped solve a hit and run. That is the only time the word appears in the Council’s entire published record.

Idaho has governed plate readers by statute since 1 July 2025, three months before that vote. 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. In August 2026 the Chief told the Council the department planned to change its retention. St. Anthony’s plate readers has the agenda line, the minutes and the statute.

The county buys its cameras inside other things

Fremont County’s own purchases are smaller and better documented, and three of the recent ones reached the Board folded into something else.

A camera and GPS system for the road department’s trucks and graders came through in February 2026 as the second line of an equipment purchasing plan, at $16,566.03, between a transport trailer and a transport truck. The plan passed as one vote and the minutes carry no discussion of it. Cameras and location tracking on the road fleet.

At the same meeting the Board approved a radar that senses the bodies of people in the jail’s holding cells, for $5,500 and $1,000 a year, presented as medical monitoring for people who refuse to eat. It cost less than the elevator contract approved in the item before it. The radar in the jail cells.

And the county’s largest imaging purchase has no device word in it at all: an Assessor’s contract for aerial photography of the county at $34,483.33 a year for three years, pitched to several departments at once, with the Sheriff asking about search and rescue. The aerial imagery contract.

The rule about the footage was narrowed and never finished

The county’s older cameras were bought the way a small county should buy them. Jail cameras in 2004 went out to three quotes. Courthouse cameras in 2010 came with a recommendation for fixed rather than moving cameras, a decision to put better locks on the prosecutor’s office instead of a camera, and a note that the feed would go to the Sheriff.

Then the county tried to write down who could watch the recordings. In April 2016 the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney told the commissioners he did not believe video is a public record. That November he brought a resolution setting out the procedure for requesting footage. The Sheriff objected that his officers and the courthouse bailiff should not have to go through it, and the minutes record that the attorney would rewrite the resolution to exclude them. We could not find the resolution again in the ten years of minutes that follow. The courthouse and jail cameras.

The city’s body cameras were bought twice by the county

St. Anthony’s first body cameras came on a 2015 state homeland security grant the county commissioners signed, and six more arrived in 2019 on Department of Homeland Security money held by the county’s emergency management coordinator. The department’s current body and in-car system, LensLock at $18,000 in its first year and $15,000 in each of four more, was read to the City Council in a department report and never voted on. St. Anthony’s body and in-car cameras.

What we did not find

No license plate reader appears anywhere in the Board of County Commissioners’ minutes or agendas, 1981 to September 2026. Every use of the phrase license plate in that record is vehicle registration, exempt plates for taxing districts, proposed licensing of all-terrain vehicles or centennial plate revenue.

The county’s drones belong to the Noxious Weed Department and spray weeds. There are three of them, bought on competitive bids, flown by licensed pilots against invasive plants. No sheriff’s drone appears in the county’s record at all. The one drone the Atlas of Surveillance records here belongs to the St. Anthony Police Department and was given away, with a camera system, to a child protection charity in 2020.

We could not find a published plate reader policy for the St. Anthony Police Department on any host we reached, and no contract, price or camera count for its readers appears in any city record.

Ashton, Island Park, Newdale, Parker, Teton, Drummond and Warm River were not swept. None has a mapped device or an Atlas of Surveillance entry, and nothing here is a finding about them.