Lassen County

Thirteen fixed licence plate readers, bought for $98,950 in October 2024, and not a cent of it came from Lassen County.

The whole decision is one board item, and two things about it are worth reading beside the rest of this site.

It is titled a bid award. The board was asked to award the bid to Flock Group Inc., not to waive the requirement to seek one. Lake County, documented here on the same day, brought four plate reader items to its board and three of them opened by waiving competitive bidding on the grounds that the goods were unique. Neither route is unlawful. Only one produces a price somebody else was asked to beat, and if there are competing bids in this county’s file they are the only benchmark on this site for what these systems cost when a vendor has company.

And the money is federal. In the memo’s own words the purchase was “100% grant funded”, from the Homeland Security Grant Program. That is now the pattern in rural California rather than the exception: Humboldt’s cameras came from a Byrne JAG grant and a Homeland Security grant, Mendocino applied twice to a Department of Justice programme, and Lassen’s thirteen are Homeland Security in full. Four counties, four systems, and in each case the county’s own ratepayers were told the equipment cost them nothing.

That is worth being precise about. The money is public either way; it is simply federal rather than local. What changes is the decision. A board weighing a purchase against its own budget is making a trade-off. A board told the purchase is free to it is making a different kind of decision, and any case for saying no has to come from somewhere other than the ledger.

The memo that carried the request describes the system largely in the vendor’s own words, down to a trademark symbol, and passes on two company commitments as settled fact: that the agency owns all the data, and that the company will never share or sell it. Nothing about that is improper, and the memo is published where anyone can read it. It is the fourth agency documented on this site whose official account of a plate reader programme reproduces the seller’s description of it, and four is a pattern in how these systems get explained to the people approving them.

One thing the record does not settle. A promise that the vendor will not share or sell data is not an answer to whether another of that vendor’s customers can search these thirteen cameras. Those are different mechanisms, and the second is the one the state’s guidance to every California agency addresses and the one at issue in its pending case against El Cajon. Nothing Lassen’s board was given speaks to it, and nothing we read establishes how this county’s system is configured.