Lemhi County Sheriff | The Lemhi County jail and courthouse cameras

Lemhi County has had cameras on its public buildings for at least twelve years. In March 2014 the Building and Grounds Supervisor asked the commissioners whether they wanted cameras in front of the courthouse too, on the grounds that the Brooklyn Annex and most of the courthouse already had them.^[3] The Board asked him to get prices. A year later he was buying one more camera for the Brooklyn hall and repairing a DVR.^[4]

That is the whole of the old record: a supervisor’s updates, no vote, no price, no policy.

The letter

On 8 December 2025 the item came back as something else. Under a heading the clerk typed as “IN THE MATTER OF HOMLEAND SECURITY CAMERAS”, staff from the county jail told the Board about a recent letter from Homeland Security, which stated that the jail’s current camera system is no longer approved. The county has one year to implement the required changes.^[1]

The minutes do not say which part of Homeland Security wrote, what standard the system failed, or what the required changes are.

A company called Verkada then presented its camera system to the commissioners, and the jail commander presented bids for both a five year and a ten year contract with Verkada, along with bids from other companies for comparison. Those other companies are not named and no figure of any kind is recorded.

The Clerk asked whether the Homeland Security letter covered only the cameras at the jail and the courthouse. It did. Separate bids had been submitted for the Brooklyn and Probation Office locations, which are county buildings the letter does not reach.

One commissioner asked how long the bids would hold, and whether the county could re bid closer to the next budget cycle, since the expense was not in the current budget. He was told the bids are valid only until 1 January.

Where it stops

That is the last thing the public record says. The Board’s published minutes run to 24 August 2026, and no award, no contract, no vote and no second reading of the jail cameras appears in any of them.^[2] The word Verkada does not appear in the county’s record again.

So the position as published is this: a federal agency told the county its jail cameras are not good enough, the county had a year from December 2025, bids that expired on New Year’s Day were the last thing anyone voted on or did not vote on, and a resident reading the county’s website cannot tell whether anything was bought.

What a new system would change

The cameras that exist watch county buildings. A cloud camera platform of the kind Verkada sells is a different thing from the DVR in a closet that the 2015 minutes describe: recordings leave the building, they are searchable, and who can see them becomes a question of accounts and permissions rather than of who has a key to the room. None of that is decided in a purchase order, and none of it appears in any Lemhi County document we could read.

The county has no published policy for its building cameras. There is no rule on the record about who may pull a recording, for what, or how long recordings are kept.

If you want an answer

The Board of County Commissioners meets on the second and fourth Monday of the month at the Brooklyn Annex, 200 Fulton Street in Salmon. The jail commander and the Sheriff come before it regularly, and this item has come up twice under department updates rather than as an action item, so the agenda will not always warn you.

The Idaho Public Records Act is the other route. The letter, the bids and any contract are records of the county, and a request to the Clerk at 208-742-1665 is how a resident gets them.