Lemhi County

Volunteers have mapped 5 devices in Lemhi County: 3 surveillance cameras, 1 license plate reader and 1 device of unrecorded type. Three of them stand in downtown Salmon and two beside each other on Idaho 28 south of Leadore, where a Flock Safety plate reader sits next to an Idaho Transportation Department traffic and weather camera. None of them names an operator. The EFF Atlas of Surveillance has no entry for any agency here.

We read the Board of County Commissioners’ and the Planning and Zoning Commission’s published record for 2025 and 2026, and what the Internet Archive kept of the county’s older website, where the Board’s minutes run from 2007 to 2021. That is 450 documents, of which 447 could be read. The Board’s minutes for 2022, 2023 and 2024 are unread. The Salmon City Council’s record is unread.

What that record shows is a small county that has cameras on its buildings, cameras at its dumps, no cameras on its deputies, and a plate reader program it hears about from the city next door.

The Sheriff has no body cameras, and the plan is somebody else’s grant

On 27 April 2026 Sheriff John Bennett told the commissioners that his office has no body cameras and no in-car camera systems, and that a system covering both would cost about $30,000 a year over five years, which the budget will not carry. The route he described instead was a $400,000 grant the City of Salmon is pursuing, with the county invited to apply jointly, for a package of body cameras, in-car cameras, jail cameras and prosecutor video management from Motorola or Axon. About 12 to 13 units would come to the county and 12 to the city.

The commissioners asked good questions about what happens when the grant runs out: replacement costs, ongoing annual costs, and whether the county would own the equipment or lease it. Nobody asked what the cameras would record, who could watch it, or how long it would be kept, and no Lemhi County agency publishes a rule about any of that.

Nineteen years earlier this Board told a different sheriff to look into car video equipment and buy it as the budget allowed. Nothing in the record shows he ever did.

The jail cameras stopped being approved

In December 2025 jail staff told the Board that a letter from Homeland Security said the jail’s current camera system is no longer approved, and that the county has a year to make the required changes. A company called Verkada presented, and bids were taken for five year and ten year contracts along with bids from other companies for comparison. Separate bids covered the Brooklyn Annex and the Probation Office. No figure of any kind is recorded, the bids expired on 1 January 2026, and nothing about the jail cameras appears in the Board’s published record after that.

Plate readers arrive sideways

On 23 February 2026 the Sheriff reported that the city had received a grant to install license plate readers, and that he was unsure how many would be installed or where they would be located. Two weeks later the Board’s own agenda carried an item reading “LICENSE PLATE READER DISCUSSION”. The minutes of that meeting record no such item.

The one reader volunteers have mapped is 35 miles from Salmon on a state highway, with no operator recorded. Nothing in the county’s record names an owner, a vendor, a price, a count or a location for any plate reader, and neither the county nor the city publishes a policy for one. Idaho has governed plate readers by statute since 1 July 2025: the law limits what they may be used for, requires access controls, training and a log of every query, and orders an audit of those logs twice a year. It sets no limit on how long the reads may be kept.

Cameras at the dumps

The county put cameras at its rural waste transfer sites in 2021 to slow illegal dumping. The whole published record of that is one sentence in a supervisor’s update: no vendor, no price, no count, no vote. In August 2026 the same supervisor brought the Board a quote from K12 Tech for more, at an estimated $50,000, and the commissioners agreed to review it.

What this record does not cover

The Salmon City Council’s own record, which is where both grants live. The Board’s minutes for 2022, 2023 and 2024, which are not published on any host. And any rule, anywhere in this county, about who may watch what a camera records and for how long. We found none.