The Trempealeau County Board will vote next month, at its August meeting in Whitehall, on Supervisor Parrish’s motion to terminate the sheriff’s office contract with Flock Safety, whose license-plate readers now photograph and log traffic on county roads. This page takes no position on how that vote should go. We take a firm position on something narrower and, we would argue, more important: that the vote happen at all, by roll call, with every supervisor’s name attached.
Consider how the cameras got here. They did not arrive through a board resolution, a public hearing, or a line item debated in open session. They arrived by purchase order. The agreement renews automatically each fall unless the county sends written notice to the contrary. The default outcome — the one that requires no one to do anything — is that a network capable of logging the movements of every driver in the county continues indefinitely, searchable across Flock’s multi-agency system, without any elected official ever having voted for it.
Auto-renewal is a fine mechanism for photocopier leases. It is a poor one for deciding how much surveillance a county of coulees and small towns will accept. When a contract renews by calendar rather than by ballot, a civil-liberties question gets outsourced to a date on a page. Nobody is accountable, because nobody decided.
The agreement renews automatically each fall unless the county sends written notice to the contrary.
The Pioneer’s summary of the agreement’s renewal clause
Reasonable people here disagree about the cameras themselves. The sheriff’s office has described the readers as an investigative tool; Parrish has argued the county never consented to them. Both positions deserve a full hearing, and both deserve an answer delivered in public, so that voters from Arcadia to Osseo to Galesville know where their supervisor stood.
And whichever side prevails in August, the work is not finished. If the cameras stay, the county needs a written policy — not a vendor’s default settings — spelling out who may search the plate database, for what purposes, and under whose supervision. It needs search logs published on a regular schedule, so residents can see how the system is actually used. And it needs a sunset-and-review clause, so the question returns to the board on a fixed date instead of sliding quietly into another renewal. If the cameras go, the board should adopt the same rules anyway, so the next piece of surveillance equipment cannot arrive the way this one did.
The Pioneer has a pending records request for the county’s Flock search logs, and we will report what they show. In the meantime, the board owes the public one thing above all: a decision that is actually made, not merely allowed to happen.