Bingham County Sheriff | The Bingham County drone program

Bingham County’s drone program is not in the Sheriff’s budget. It is in the road department’s, the landfill’s and the assessor’s, in three equal shares.

On 13 September 2023 the Board approved renewal of a drone license at $12,000.00, split one third each from Road and Bridge, Solid Waste and the Assessor’s geographic information system fund, at $4,000.00 apiece.^[1] None of those three departments enforces anything. The use the record describes fits them: two months earlier the Public Works Director had shown the Board drone footage along East River Road, taken to decide where a culvert should go to avoid future flooding.^[4]

The other drone

Then, in a years of service recognition at the March 2024 staff meeting, a second aircraft appears in one clause. A Sheriff’s Office detective, being thanked for fifteen years with the county, “recently wrote a grant that assisted the county in obtaining a thermal drone”.^[2]

That is the entire published record of it. Which grant, from whom, for how much, with what conditions, and what the aircraft has been used for since are all absent. A thermal drone is not a survey tool for a culvert. It sees people and animals through darkness and vegetation, which is why sheriff’s offices buy them, and it is the one piece of county aviation whose purpose the record never states.

Nobody has to be able to fly it

In September 2025 the question of who operates the county drone surfaced in an unlikely place. The Board was filling the vacant County Surveyor post, and the previous surveyor, asked to review the job description, had suggested two additions: a pilot’s license to operate the county drone, and a floodplain certificate. Human Resources said neither was in the proposed description and offered to add them. The Public Works Director said he would favor leaving both out if that helped attract applicants, or making them preferred rather than required. The Planning and Development Director argued for the floodplain certification on its own merits. The Board was in favor of advertising the post and adding the two items, and the motion that followed set only the salary range.^[3]

So the aircraft the Sheriff’s Office got on a grant, and the license three civilian departments pay for, are treated in the record as the same thing, and the only job the county has tied to flying is a surveyor’s.

What we do not know

The county publishes no policy for unmanned aircraft. There is no rule on the record about when a drone may be flown over private property, whether footage is kept, for how long, or who may watch it. There are no flight logs in any published document, and the Sheriff’s Office has never described a drone flight to the Board.

If you want an answer

Road and Bridge, Solid Waste and the Assessor each pay a third of the license, so each one’s budget hearing is a place to ask what the county flies and how often. The Board of County Commissioners meets through the week at 501 North Maple Street, Room 204, in Blackfoot, and its Request for Meeting form is how a resident gets an item scheduled. The grant paperwork behind the thermal drone is a public record under the Idaho Public Records Act and can be asked for from the County Clerk.