Lake County Sheriff | License plate readers

Four contracts, one vendor, no bidding

Lake County has been leasing licence plate cameras from the same company since 2021. Four items reached the Board of Supervisors, and the first thing three of them ask for is permission not to shop around.

June 2021, matter 21-503:

(a) Waive formal bidding process pursuant to section 2-38.2 of the County Purchasing Policy due to the unique goods and services, (b) approve a two year lease of twenty-six (26) Automated License Plate Reader Cameras from Flock Group Inc. […] in an amount not to exceed $65,000/year

September 2021, matter 21-960: the same waiver, for nineteen more cameras, at $52,250 in the first year and $47,500 in the second.

December 2021, matter 21-1321: an amendment adding an “Advanced Search Feature” at up to $3,500 a year.

February 2024, matter 24-135, which waives bidding on two grounds at once:

Waiving the formal bidding process, per Purchasing Code 2-38.1, as this is an annual contract for services that have not increased more than the consumer price index and 2-38.2 as it is not in the public interest due to the unique nature of goods or services

and then approves a five-year lease of twenty-six cameras at up to $68,500 a year, $342,500 in total.

What that does and does not mean

None of this is unlawful, and nothing on this page suggests otherwise. Sole-source procurement is provided for in the very purchasing code these items cite, and it exists because competitive bidding genuinely does not fit every purchase. Plenty of counties do it.

What it means is narrower and worth knowing. The price Lake County pays for this system has never been tested against another offer. Over five years the current lease commits $342,500 of public money to one company, on terms nobody else was asked to beat.

The 2024 justification is the interesting one, because it contains its own answer. The county says bidding can be waived partly because the price has not risen faster than inflation. That is a reasonable-sounding test, and it measures this vendor against its own past prices rather than against anyone else’s. A contract that has never been bid has no other benchmark to fail.

Where the policy is better than most

Two things in this county’s record are stronger than the equivalent in most counties on this site.

The Sheriff’s published Policy 469 caps retention at a maximum of thirty days. The standard clause in this family of manual sets a minimum of one year, and most agencies documented here publish it unchanged. Somebody in Lake County edited that sentence, and edited it in the direction that keeps less data.

And the signed contract agrees with it. The order form attached to the 2024 lease carries a field reading “Retention Period: 30 Days”.

That is not a given. In Del Norte the same two documents said different things, one setting a minimum of one year and the other a field reading zero days, with nothing in the packet to reconcile them and no way for a reader to know which applied. Here they match, which means a resident who reads the policy has been told something the contract actually supports.

Where it is not

Policy 469.7, the release clause, is the common short form:

The ALPR data may be shared only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes or as otherwise permitted by law, using the following procedures:

There is no definition of a public agency, no geographic limit, and no mention of out-of-state or federal agencies anywhere in the policy.

The date on that policy is 31 January 2024. Three months earlier the California Department of Justice had sent every law enforcement agency in the state a bulletin saying, in terms, that a public agency means a California one and that the prohibition reaches databases accessed through vendors. Some agencies wrote that into their manuals afterwards. This one did not, or had not by the release we read.

That is a statement about a document, not about conduct. State law binds this office whether or not its manual repeats the point, and we have read a policy rather than a log.

What the record does not settle

How many cameras there are. Twenty-six were leased in 2021, nineteen more followed three months later, and the 2024 lease covers twenty-six. Whether that replaced the earlier fleet or renewed part of it is not in anything we read.

And what the board actually decided. The county’s agenda system records an action for one of the four matters and a roll call for none of them. That is a statement about the completeness of the portal’s data rather than about the board: an agenda title proves what was proposed, not what was voted. The 2024 agreement is signed, so that lease was executed. For the rest, the minutes will say, and the county’s board agendas back to 2021 are already fetched and waiting to be read.