Blackfoot Police | The Blackfoot plate reader grant application

Here is everything Bingham County’s published record says about license plate readers. It is in the minutes of the Blackfoot Transportation Commission for 26 February 2025, at the end, under the heading “New City Updates”, between a note about a restaurant opening late and a note that there would be no March meeting:

Chief Croft is applying for a grant to get 3 License Plate Readers installed in Blackfoot. One at Parkway & Bergener One on North Highway 91 One on South Highway 91

That is the whole of it.^[1]

What is not there

The Transportation Commission is a city committee that spends its meetings on speed limits, school crossings, pedestrian signals and where to put a pneumatic traffic counter. It has no budget and it approves nothing. The item carries no motion and no vote, because there was nothing to vote on.

The Blackfoot City Council, which does have a budget, has never discussed a license plate reader in any document it publishes. Neither has the Planning and Zoning Commission, the Urban Renewal Agency or the Board of County Commissioners next door. A keyword sweep of 994 published city documents from January 2018 to September 2026, covering every category the city’s agenda portal carries, returns no vendor name, no abbreviation, no contract and no second mention of a reader.^[2]

So a resident of Blackfoot who wanted to know whether their city was about to start photographing every car that passes three intersections had one chance to find out, in a committee minute, and no way at all to find out what happened afterward.

Why three corners matter

A plate reader is not a camera pointed at a street. It photographs every passing plate, converts it to text, stamps it with a time and a place, and files it. Put one on the north highway and one on the south highway of a town of twelve thousand people, and you have a record of nearly every vehicle entering or leaving, held for as long as whoever runs it decides to hold it. The third, at a crossroads inside the city, fills in the middle.

Idaho has governed this since 1 July 2025. Senate Bill 1180, now Idaho Code 49-1432, limits what plate reader data may be used for, requires access controls and training, requires a log of every query recording the user, the date, the time and the purpose, and requires those logs to be audited twice a year. What the statute does not set is a retention limit.^[3]

The application described in February 2025 predates that law by four months. If readers went in, the statute now applies to them, and the audits it requires would be public records.

What we do not know

Whether the grant was applied for, whether it was won, whether anything was installed, and what the department’s rules are if it was. None of those questions has an answer in any document the city or the county publishes. Volunteers mapping surveillance devices for OpenStreetMap have recorded four cameras in Bingham County and none of them is tagged as a plate reader.

If you want an answer

The Blackfoot City Council meets at 7:00 PM on the first Tuesday of the month in the Council Chambers at 157 North Broadway, and the police budget is presented to it. The Transportation Commission meets separately and publishes in the same portal.

The plainest route is a public records request to the City of Blackfoot under the Idaho Public Records Act for the grant application referred to in the Transportation Commission’s minutes of 26 February 2025, the award or denial, and any plate reader policy the department holds. If no such records exist, that answer is itself worth having on paper.