Franklin County Sheriff | The dispatch and records subscription shared across the state line
Franklin County's dispatchers moved onto a Spillman and Motorola system shared with Cache Valley, in Utah, in September 2025. It is paid for out of 911 fees, and the minutes say nothing about what is shared.
At a glance
- Who approved it
- The Board of County Commissioners, unanimously [1]
- Who it is shared with
- Cache Valley [1]
- What it does
- Receives 911 calls and passes them to deputies [1]
- Price
- No figure is recorded. The minutes say 911 fees pay for the system and that sharing it saves the county money [1]
- What data is shared, and with whom
- Not stated in the county record [1]
- How long records are kept
- Not stated in the county record [1]
How it happened
- Decision
Onto a shared system
The Sheriff, the Civil Defense director and the assistant director present a Spillman and Motorola subscription to the Board. The minutes describe it as a new system shared with Cache Valley that will save the county money, paid for from 911 fees, and as the way dispatchers receive incoming 911 calls and pass them to deputies in their cars. The Board accepts it unanimously. The same meeting hears that the Sheriff wants to upgrade the county's radio repeaters, the current ones being old and no longer serviceable. [1]
A dispatch system is not a camera, and nobody objects to one. It is how a call for help reaches a deputy. It is also, in every county that runs one, the largest single collection of information a sheriff’s office holds about the people who live there: who called, from where, about what, and what happened next.
On 8 September 2025 the Sheriff, the Civil Defense director and his assistant brought the Board a Spillman and Motorola subscription. The minutes describe it as a new system, shared with Cache Valley, that would save the county money, paid for out of 911 fees, and say that it “is how the dispatchers receive the 911 phone calls coming in and transfer to the deputy” vehicles. The Board accepted it unanimously.[1]
Cache Valley is two states
Franklin County sits at the north end of Cache Valley. The south end is in Utah, and its population center is Logan, a city several times the size of anything in Franklin County. The minutes name the valley rather than a list of agencies, so which departments are on the system, and how many of them are under another state’s public records law and another state’s rules about who may look at what, is not something the county’s record answers.
Sharing a dispatch platform across a state line is sensible for a county of fifteen thousand people with one small city in it. Ambulances and deputies cross that line already. The question a shared system raises is a different one, and it is not asked anywhere in this record: when two states’ worth of agencies run on one platform, whose rules govern the records, and who can search them.
What is not in the minutes
There is no price, no term, no list of participating agencies, no statement of what data crosses the line, and no retention period. The item runs to five sentences, and it is the whole public account of the system through which every emergency call in Franklin County now passes.
What we do not know
- Which agencies in Cache Valley are on the shared system, and are any of them in Utah?
- Can an agency on the shared system search Franklin County's incident records, or only its own?
- How long are computer-aided dispatch and records entries kept?
- What does the subscription cost, and what share of it does Franklin County pay?
What you can do
Show up
Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have confirmed where each of them meets in Franklin County and how public comment works there.
How to show up in Franklin County →Protect yourself
Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.
Surveillance Self-Defense →Sources
- 1. Franklin County Board of County Commissioners minutes, 8 September 2025, Spillman/Motorola Subscription · Meeting record · · accessed
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