Franklin County Sheriff and Preston Police | GPS trackers on the county fleet

Most of the surveillance this project documents points at the public. This one points at the county’s own staff, and it is the widest-reaching decision in Franklin County’s record.

In August 2024 the commissioners sat down with a list of county vehicles and decided which ones would get a location tracker.^[1] The list they agreed on was not only law enforcement. It took in all the ambulances and a truck, the sheriff’s department vehicles, Juvenile Services, and the Assessor’s truck and Durango. They held two vehicles back, the Abatement and Weed spray trucks, on the grounds that those already carry a GPS that tracks their sprayers.

The contract, and the screen

The contract itself arrived two months later, on 15 October 2024, presented not by a county officer but by a sergeant from the Preston Police Department. He told the Board his own department already had trackers on ten of its vehicles, and that dispatch had been monitoring them, which was useful for seeing where personnel are.^[2]

The scope the minutes record is this: trackers on County Sheriff, Probation, Assessor, EMS and Building Inspection vehicles, and “Dispatch will monitor all vehicles.”^[2] Views can be customized so that deputies and others see particular vehicles. The Board approved the contract and the installation unanimously.

Two of those five departments do not enforce anything. An assessor drives to a property to value it. A building inspector drives to a site to inspect it. From October 2024 both of them do that with the sheriff’s dispatch center able to see where they are.

The policy is the next item down

Immediately after the contract, the same agenda carries “Proposed Policy for Vehicle Tracking”. The same sergeant presented it. It was not the county’s policy: it was the one the City of Preston had already adopted, which the county attorney had read and agreed with. It was to go into the county personnel manual, for future employees to sign and for current employees with access to the tracking to sign.^[2]

The minutes for the item above it record a motion, a second and a unanimous vote. The minutes for this one record no motion and no vote. The contract was a decision the Board made in public. The rules for using what it bought arrived as a document to be filed, and the county does not publish its personnel manual, so what those rules say is not something a resident can read.

Six weeks later the sergeant who brought both appears in the same minutes as Sheriff-Elect.^[3] The office he now leads runs the dispatch center that watches the trackers.

What the money does not show

In two years of minutes the Board never states what this costs. It approved the contract in October 2024 without a figure and renewed it in July 2026 without one, as “the annual agreement for the County fleet”.^[4] Fleet telematics is sold as a fleet management product, and it is a reasonable thing for a county to buy. It is also a continuous record of where a set of public employees have been, held by a vendor, watched from a law enforcement dispatch center, under rules kept in a staff handbook.