Morrow County

Nobody had looked at Morrow County before this page. It has no row in the EFF Atlas of Surveillance, no camera mapped in OpenStreetMap, and no entry in any surveillance dataset this site uses. It was swept because it was the last county in Oregon whose portal was left to read, not because anything pointed here.

On 27 May 2025 the Board of Commissioners approved a five year, $280,000 agreement with Utility Associates, Inc. The agenda item was titled “Sole Source Determination: Sheriff’s Office Body & Vehicle Camera System”. The vendor’s offer letter in the Board’s packet lists seven things the money buys. Item (e) is “2 PULSAR mobile automated license plate readers devices installed on your Morrow County Sheriff’s Office vehicle”.

That is where the plate readers are: item (e) of seven, inside a body camera contract, in a document titled after the cameras. The rest of the list is 27 body camera packages, 27 vehicle units, 21 in-car video systems, 27 holster sensors, dispatch integration, and a terabyte of storage.

The process was public and it worked the way it is supposed to. The Board approved the sole source determination on 5 May 2025, posted it, and ran a seven day protest period. The minutes record that it ended with no objections, and both motions passed unanimously. Nobody protested. On this record, nobody outside the room knew there were plate readers in it.

The county changed vendors rather than staying with Axon, whose contract ended on 30 June 2025. The stated reason for skipping competitive bidding was that Utility Associates has “unique and proprietary technologies and offerings offered only by this vendor which are not available from any other source.” Yamhill County used the same statute in the same period to reach the opposite conclusion, sole sourcing to Axon because a Taser relationship going back to the 1990s made other vendors incompatible. One county says only Axon fits what we own. The other says only Utility has what we want.

Two clauses of the contract are worth reading. Section 2.4.1 sets a default plate reader retention period of twelve months, applying until the county adopts a retention policy of its own. Oregon’s SB 1516 now caps that at thirty days unless the data is tied to an investigation. The contract was signed in May 2025 and the statute took effect in spring 2026, so this is not a violation. It is a default twelve times longer than current law that governs until Morrow County replaces it, and whether the county has replaced it is the first records request we have drafted here.

Section 2.4.2 makes this county’s plate data available to every other Utility client in Oregon by default, with the county receiving theirs in return, and out of state access available on request if the other agency agrees. Sharing is the resting state of the system rather than something the county opts into.

What we read was 359 machine readable documents, every Board record published from January 2025 onward. There is no facial recognition and no gunshot detection anywhere in it. There are 124 mentions of drones that we have not finished reading, so this page makes no claim about drones in either direction. Everything before 2025 is unread, as is every city record for Boardman, Heppner, Irrigon, Ione and Lexington.

One footnote for anyone searching the same record. Seven documents match “Flock,” the plate reader vendor. All seven are waterfowl, from an airport wildlife assessment near Boardman about a stormwater pond that might attract roosting birds.