Franklin County Sheriff | The county buildings on one camera system

Franklin County did not decide to put its buildings under camera surveillance. It decided four separate times to fix or extend a camera system, and the result is that its buildings are under camera surveillance on one platform that a police dispatch center can watch.

That is how most of this happens, in most counties, and Franklin’s record is unusually clear about it because the county keeps good minutes.

The first one is the one with no vote

On 8 January 2024 the commissioners looked at a Verkada bid. The minutes say: “It was determined that the County will continue with IT Specialists to install the Verkada system in the old Courthouse and other buildings.”^[1] There is no motion, no second and no recorded vote, in a set of minutes that records a motion, a second and a vote for almost every other item that day. One commissioner, Boyd Burbank, abstained. The minutes do not say why, and this page does not guess.

Two months later the county terminated Teton Fire and Security, the contractor it had been using, and this time there was a motion and a unanimous vote. The reason was one sentence: the county had switched to Verkada for the security system.^[2]

Dispatch could not see in

The clearest statement of what the system is for comes from the Juvenile Services building. In February 2025, after an incident there and a discussion about protecting the staff, the county’s IT specialist told the Board the building’s cameras were over ten years old and that the dispatch center could not see inside it.^[3]

That is the sentence worth sitting with. The problem, as the county framed it, was not that the cameras had stopped recording. It was that the sheriff’s dispatchers could not watch. The fix was to put the building on Verkada with the rest.

Part of the money came from outside the county budget. The Civil Defense director had $10,000 of state Office of Emergency Management grant money for building security, which is the channel through which a small county buys equipment it has not put in front of anyone as a line item. The same meeting bought an ID card printer, because the Idaho Transportation Department had stopped printing employee ID cards, and the IT specialist suggested the new badge double as a key for the county’s doors.^[3]

The hall the public rents

In November 2025 the Board accepted two more bids: $24,076.24 to bring the Ambulance Building up onto Verkada and $8,232.25 to add the Robinson Building.^[5]

The Robinson Building is not an office. It is one of the county’s event venues, listed on the county’s own pages beside the fairgrounds and the event center, and residents rent it for receptions, meetings and gatherings. Nothing in the minutes discusses that, and nothing suggests anybody intended anything by it. It is simply the next building on the list.

What the county has not written down

There is no retention period in this record, no policy on who may pull footage or why, and no list of which county buildings are on the system. The January 2024 item says “the old Courthouse and other buildings” and the record never closes that phrase. For a resident, the practical question is straightforward and unanswered: if you walk into a county building in Preston, who can watch, and for how long is it kept.