Cameras at Lemhi County's transfer sites

Lemhi County is 4,564 square miles with one landfill. Residents in the outlying valleys take their waste to transfer sites instead, at Leadore, Tower Creek, Baker, Elk Bend and Maiers Lane. Those sites are unstaffed, they cost the county money, and people dump things at them that the county then has to pay to move.

That is the ordinary problem this county solved with cameras.

How it happened

In March 2016, at a landfill committee meeting the Board recorded in its minutes, one speaker reported a Utah company’s prices for locks at $34 and keys at $5, and another presented an estimate for remote dump site surveillance.^[1] Nothing was decided that night; the Board asked the Sheriff’s Department and the local sanitation company to come to the next meeting.

Five years later it was done, and the record of it is one sentence in a department update. On 28 June 2021 the Landfill Supervisor reported on the transfer sites: with large amounts of trash being dumped, crews were picking up twice a week, and they got the cameras installed at the sites in hopes of slowing the illegal dumping.^[2]

No vendor. No price. No count. No vote. The cameras exist because a supervisor mentioned that they now existed.

Why a dump camera is worth a page

A camera at a rural transfer site is not a plate reader and nobody has claimed it is. It also photographs every vehicle and every person who uses a public facility that most rural residents have no alternative to, and the county has published no rule about what happens to those pictures.

The county does not say who can watch the footage, how long it is kept, or whether anyone outside the landfill department can ask for it. When the supervisor raised vandalism at the sites in February 2026, the answer discussed in the room was a tip line and a reward, and the cameras that had been there for five years were not mentioned.^[3]

What is being bought now

In June 2026 the supervisor told the Board that a company had approached him about security cameras at the transfer sites.^[5] On 10 August he came back with information and pricing from K12 Tech, at an estimated cost of $50,000, and the commissioners agreed to review the camera proposal.^[4]

That is a large number for this county. For comparison, the two bids for the dispatch center’s new 911 consoles the same year were $46,100.05 and $62,000.00, and those run the county’s emergency communications.

No decision on the proposal appears in the Board’s published minutes, which run to 24 August 2026.

Where to ask

The Landfill Supervisor reports to the Board of County Commissioners under department updates at almost every meeting, on the second and fourth Monday of the month at the Brooklyn Annex, 200 Fulton Street in Salmon. The transfer sites have been the most argued about subject in this county’s government for two years, and the camera proposal sits inside that argument.