Sandoval County

Sandoval County’s surveillance money goes into its jail. In February 2018 the Commission approved a price agreement with VLCM Inc. to supply and install a new surveillance camera system at the Detention Center, $223,822.36, passed unanimously. In March 2023 it approved a budget resolution moving $895,000 out of the facility’s cash reserve to replace that camera system.

Four times the price, five years apart. The second one did not come to the Commission as a contract with a company’s name on it. It came as budget resolution 3-08-23.9BC(2), one of several in a block approved in a single vote, and no item in the county’s record names who supplied the equipment.

Six months later, in September 2023, another budget resolution moved $897,753.89 from cash balance to cover the cost of a new surveillance system at the same Detention Center. Six months and $2,753.89 apart, both out of cash reserves, both for cameras at the same building. The record does not say whether that is the same money restated or a second sum, so this page does not add them together.

The same meeting bought the deputies’ cameras

At that March 2023 meeting, in the same block of budget resolutions, the Commission accepted federal money for the Sheriff’s Office: Congressionally Directed Spending under the FY22 COPS Technology and Equipment Program, for lapel cameras and laptops. $866,000 for the cameras. $379,000 for the laptops. A month earlier it had increased the Sheriff’s body camera budget by $19,252 to reflect a reimbursement.

So one meeting’s consent business carried roughly $1.76 million of cameras, in a county of about 150,000 people. Nothing about that is irregular. Budget resolutions are where money moves, and every county in this project does it the same way. It is worth knowing because the part of a meeting where surveillance equipment is actually approved is the part nobody watches.

The county wrote rules for its own cameras

On 21 March 2019 the Commission approved a policy for acceptable use of county surveillance systems by the managers with cameras in their area of responsibility. The minutes record that it was taken immediately after the consent agenda, and that the wording was changed on the floor so that it named division directors and elected officials rather than department managers.

Most agencies in this project own cameras and have published no rule at all for who may watch the footage. Sandoval County wrote one, and then amended it on the floor over which job titles it binds. The policy itself is not published in the records we can read, so what it permits, logs and keeps is a question rather than a finding. It is the first thing to ask this county for.

The plate readers on the map belong to someone else

Volunteers have mapped fifty-four devices in Sandoval County, forty-two of them plate readers and thirty-six of those made by Flock Safety.

In the 507 documents we read there is no plate reader. No license plate reader, no automated license plate recognition, no Flock, no Vigilant, no Rekor, no Genetec. Also no face recognition, no gunshot detection, no cell site simulator, no drone and no real time crime center.

That gap has an ordinary explanation, and it is the most useful thing on this page. The EFF Atlas gives the Rio Rancho Police Department five entries here: a camera registry, plate readers, face recognition, drones and body cameras. It lists gunshot detection at Rio Rancho Public Schools. Rio Rancho is a city with its own council, and a school district answers to a school board. Neither appears in the county Commission’s minutes, because neither reports to it.

If you live in Sandoval County and want to know who is reading your number plate, the county building is the wrong room.

Four things here that look like surveillance and are not

Motorola Solutions appears twice, and both times it is radio. The county bought communications equipment for a simulcast project and countywide public safety radios in 2019, and signed a service agreement for the radio network in March 2024 with a first year purchase order of $336,168.89.

A $73,580 upgrade to an audio and video system in September 2023 is the equipment that broadcasts the Commission’s own meetings.

A $226,711.87 agreement with Summit Fire and Security in November 2024 installs fire alarm, camera and access control systems in the county’s new Regional Emergency Communication Center. That is building security for a new 911 center.

The State Homeland Security Grant appears four times and is emergency management every time: a trailer for a communications radio, the start of a search team, and a wildfire defense grant presented alongside it.

The county’s record is published, and most of it cannot be searched

This page rests on 507 of the 522 documents Sandoval County publishes for the Commission and five of its committees. One is from 2010 and the rest run from 2015 to 2026.

Half of them are photographs of paper. Every set of Commission minutes the county publishes is a scanned image with no text inside it, which means nobody can search them: not a search engine, and not a resident looking for the meeting where their own road, or their own jail, was discussed. A record you can download but cannot search is public in a narrow sense of the word.

Twelve of the documents the county’s meetings page links today do not open. The server returns you to the homepage rather than saying the file is missing, so nothing on screen tells you anything is gone. Nine of the twelve are Board of Finance minutes from 2024 to 2026, the most recent the county has.

The Commission’s meeting packets, the attachments that carry contracts and vendor quotations, are not on the county’s site at all. Those are where the company behind the 2023 jail cameras would be named.

Where this leaves a resident

Watch the budget resolutions. In this county they are not a formality: a jail camera system, lapel cameras for the Sheriff’s deputies and nearly $1.8 million between them all arrived as numbered resolutions inside a block, approved in one vote, with no company named.

Two requests are worth making. The 2019 acceptable use policy for county surveillance systems, which would say who may look at county camera footage and for how long it is kept. And the contract behind the 2023 Detention Center camera replacement, which is the only way to learn who sold it.

If your question is about the cameras on the street rather than in the jail, the meeting to attend is the Rio Rancho city council.