Kittitas County

Kittitas County has plate readers of its own. Its Sheriff’s Office contracted with Flock Group, Inc. in March 2025 for $66,500, for cameras and the data-sharing that comes with them, and two months later the county agreed with itself over where to put them: an agreement between the Sheriff’s Office and the Public Works Department for the use of county owned right-of-way.

Two weeks before that contract passed, it was pulled. The 18 February 2025 consent agenda carried the same request in the same words, and the minutes carry it followed by four words, “ITEM REMOVED FROM CONSIDERATION”. The board removed a consent item that day on a 3-0 vote. The record does not say why, and neither will we.

The county has not published how many cameras it bought, where they stand, how long the data is kept, or who is on the other side of the data-sharing. Washington law now asks some of that: RCW 10.130 has required plate reader agencies to register with the Attorney General since 30 March 2026, and from December 2027 they publish annual reports naming camera locations and sharing partners. Nothing in this county’s record shows whether the Sheriff’s Office registered.

What else is in the county’s own record

Axon, continuously. Vehicle-based video evidence systems on the commissioners’ agendas in February 2022, a quote for eleven of them that December, then contracts in September 2023, October 2025 and June 2026. Tasers for the jail in October 2024, and in December 2025 a contract for replacement taser and body camera equipment.

In June 2026 the board approved a professional services agreement to “Provide and Install 22 New Cameras and Relocate 2 Existing Cameras at the Kittitas County Jail, Sheriff’s Office, and Public Health”. Twenty-two cameras across three county buildings, one of them a health department.

Public Works went shopping for a drone of its own in September 2022, with a request for proposals for a survey drone. That is the second Washington county on this site to buy a surveying aircraft outside the sheriff’s office, alongside Skagit’s Genesis 1.

The drones here belong to volunteers

Kittitas County Search and Rescue, a nonprofit formed in 1991 at the Sheriff’s Office’s request, states on its own site that it acts only at the direction of the Sheriff’s Office. Its UAS team flies small packable drones and larger multi-rotor aircraft with infrared cameras into search areas ground teams cannot reach. Public-safety capability held in a volunteer body under law enforcement direction is the county’s one documented aerial program, and the records queue asks for the agreement and the data-handling rules behind it.

How much of this county we have read

All 256 dated Board of County Commissioners agendas the county publishes, going back to 2016. They carry clean text and everything quoted above is quoted from them.

The board also publishes 4,403 minutes files, and those are photographs of pages. We pulled three by date, for the two Flock meetings and the right-of-way agreement, and the OCR is poor enough that one header reads KTTTITAS COT NTY, VilASHTNGTON. The $66,500 is legible in one of them. Nothing on this page is quoted from a Kittitas minutes file.

So this page can show you what the board was asked to do across ten years, and what it did on three days. In the agendas we read there is no facial recognition, no gunshot detection, no cell-site simulator and no camera registry.

What this record does not cover

What the board decided on any day we did not pull the minutes for. The cities: Ellensburg’s police run their own body cameras and a Flock system at about $40,000 a year, and police say a man stole three of the city of Kittitas’s Flock cameras in July and August 2026 and described the thefts as a protest against government surveillance. City systems are never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 33 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.