Baker County

In August 2024 the Baker County Sheriff told the Board of Commissioners something most sheriffs no longer have occasion to say. Sheriff Ash reported that his department “is one of the only departments in the County that does not have body cameras.”

He had three bids. He recommended Axon, at $60,373.26.

The money came from three places. A federal Small, Rural, and Tribal Body-Worn Camera grant put in $30,000 and required the county to match it dollar for dollar. An insurer, CIS, added $10,000. That left $20,373.26 the county had not budgeted, and the Board voted to take it from the county insurance fund. A year later the commitment came back as Resolution No. 2025-1011, an appropriation transfer inside the Insurance Fund moving spending authority to a capital line, in the minutes’ words, “based on a commitment that the Commissioners made to help with body cameras for the Sheriff’s office.”

The reason given for choosing the vendor was not price and not capability. It was fit: “Purchasing from this company will allow our video evidence to seamlessly integrate into the system currently in use by the County.” A camera platform was selected because the county already stored evidence in it. That is how most of these decisions get made, and it is worth seeing written down.

Klamath County reached for the same federal grant, on the same one to one match, at a meeting in March 2026. Two Oregon counties, two years apart, funding the same equipment through the same program.

The county owns a drone that somebody else flies

The Wolf Depredation Committee had state money that had to be spent on non-lethal methods. It asked to buy an American made drone for hazing. The Board approved a Skydio X10, accessories and starter kit, for $14,081.20.

The minutes describe the arrangement in one clause: the drone “would be owned by Baker County but operated by wildlife services.” A later session ratified the memorandum of understanding with USDA Wildlife Services drone pilots, discussed as wolf deterrence.

This is wildlife management. Nothing we read connects the aircraft to policing, and it should not be read as a police drone. What it does show is a split that matters for anyone trying to ask a question about it. The county owns the aircraft. A federal agency flies it. A resident who wanted to know where it went, what it recorded, or how long that recording is kept would have to work out which of the two to ask, and neither the purchase nor the memorandum answers it.

Wasco County has the same shape from the other direction: a drone owned by the state, shared regionally, flown locally.

One lawyer asked the right question

At a 2024 session, after a Department of Homeland Security recommendation reached the Board secondhand, the commissioners discussed security cameras. The minutes record that County Counsel Kim Mosier “made clarifications around cameras detecting conversations rather than just video surveillance.”

Recording a conversation and recording a picture are different things in Oregon law, and they are governed separately. In eleven Oregon counties we have read, this is the only place a county’s own lawyer is minuted raising that distinction before a camera purchase. It is a small line in a long meeting. It is also the question the other purchases in this record did not have asked of them.

What the county bought, and what it never wrote down

Alongside the body cameras and the drone, the same two years of minutes carry a handful of smaller camera lines. The Transient Lodging Tax committee recommended and the Board approved $11,966.66 for cameras at Hewitt and Holcomb Park, which is tourism money paying for park cameras. Federal victim assistance grants fund security cameras for the district attorney’s victim services alongside food, gas and cars. The county museum spent $93,312.42 with Alpine Alarm on the Armstrong Nugget Exhibit, choosing a monitored system over a door-only one, which is building security for a gold display. And the district attorney, asking the Board to find a funding source for his investigator, described part of the job as reviewing body camera footage and categorizing evidence, which is the running cost of a camera program showing up in a budget conversation about staff.

In none of it does the county adopt a rule.

Across fifty sessions and 672,835 characters, there is no retention period, no access policy, no audit requirement and no flight log obligation for any of this equipment. Not for the body cameras the county bought with federal money. Not for the drone it owns and does not fly. Not for the park cameras. The one privacy question in the entire record was raised by county counsel, and it was about a different purchase.

No plate readers, and we can say so

We read every Board of Commissioners session from 17 July 2024 through 1 April 2026. All fifty documents are readable text, none needed optical character recognition, and none failed to download. That is unusual, and it is what makes the next sentence worth anything.

In those fifty sessions there is no mention of a plate reader. No ALPR, no automated or automatic license plate recognition, no Flock Safety, no Vigilant, no Utility Associates. No facial recognition and no gunshot detection. No reference to Oregon’s new plate reader statute, SB 1516, in a window that spans its passage.

Baker County has no cameras mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors and no Flock transparency portal, so nothing contradicts that.

Scoped to those documents, we could not find any record of Baker County buying, discussing or authorizing a plate reader. That is a finding about the county board’s record, and it is not a finding about the whole county. The Baker County Sheriff’s Office and the Baker City Police Department are different agencies with different records, and the EFF Atlas lists Baker City police as operating drones from Autel and DJI. We have not read a single Baker City document. That row stays unconfirmed.

What we have not read

The county’s minutes archive runs back to 2001, in plain readable text, which makes it the deepest and cheapest record of any county in this project. We read the most recent two years of it. The other twenty-three years are unread rather than empty, and nothing here should be taken as a claim about them.

Baker City, Halfway, Huntington and Sumpter have not been swept at all.