Lake County

The Sheriff’s Office here has been leasing licence plate cameras from the same company since 2021, and the county has never asked anyone else what they would charge.

Four items reached the Board of Supervisors. Twenty-six cameras in June 2021 at up to $65,000 a year. Nineteen more that September. An advanced search feature added in December. Then a five-year lease in February 2024, twenty-six cameras, up to $68,500 a year, $342,500 in total.

Three of the four open by waiving the county’s formal bidding process, each citing the purchasing code and the phrase “unique goods and services”. The 2024 item waives it on two grounds at once, including that the price had not risen faster than inflation, which measures the vendor against its own past prices rather than against anybody else’s.

None of that is unlawful and this site does not suggest it is. Sole-source procurement is provided for in the code these items cite. What it means is that the price of this county’s surveillance system has never been tested against another offer, and the record says so on the face of every item.

Two things here are better than most counties on this site. The Sheriff’s published policy caps retention at a maximum of thirty days, where the standard version of that clause sets a minimum of one year. And the signed contract says thirty days too. That agreement is not guaranteed: in Del Norte the same two documents gave different answers and nothing explained the difference.

What the policy does not do is say where the data can go. Its release clause carries no geographic limit, in a version released three months after the state told every agency in California that the limit exists.

Two cities here, Clearlake and Lakeport, are reported to run plate readers of their own. Neither has been swept, and neither figure has been checked against a document, so neither appears as a count anywhere on this site.