Columbia County

Columbia County’s cameras arrive one building at a time, and the money comes from places that have nothing to do with surveillance.

In March 2023 the General Services Director brought the Board a grant from the county’s insurance pool for cameras at the John Gumm building. From the minutes, with the county’s own typo:

“Riley Baker, General Service Director discussed a CIS grant for cameras to be installed at John Gumm. Commissioner Smith moved for the Risk Management Committee to use the remaindered of the SAFE funds for camera installation. Commissioner Magruder seconded. The motion carried unanimously.”

An insurance pool grant, topped up with the remainder of a safety reserve. No camera count, no retention period, no access rule. Wallowa County funded its cameras the same way, through two five thousand dollar risk management grants from the same pool. This is a quiet, recurring route by which Oregon counties put cameras on public buildings without a decision that looks like one.

Two years later a similar purchase produced something rarer: a disagreement. At a work session on 2 July 2025 the Board discussed upgrading the door and camera system at the Justice Court in Vernonia. The Courthouse Security Committee had quotes totaling about $15,000, of which $8,000 was the camera system and $6,735 the door, against $9,000 the Justice Court had put toward the Courthouse Security Fund.

“Commissioner Magruder would like to have more information and is not in favor of these upgrades at this time. Commissioners Smith and Garrett have no issues with the upgrades and have directed staff to work with the City of Vernonia to move forward.”

One commissioner asked for more information and was outvoted in the same paragraph. The committee had also raised the upgrade partly because there were “plans to relocate Justice Court or to terminate Justice Court Services altogether”, which is worth knowing if you use that building.

The county’s continuous camera system is in the jail. From the Jail Operating Citizens Advisory Committee on 5 January 2026, Captain Macfarlane reporting:

“Cameras operate 24/7 in the jail, and footage is used for training and security purposes. The current storage program is failing, and the new video storage project is underway.”

Recording around the clock inside a correctional facility, footage used for training as well as security, and a replacement storage system being built. How long any of it is kept, who may watch it and whether anyone audits access are questions the record does not answer anywhere. That is the first records request we have drafted here.

One more system residents should know about. A Columbia County Election Department presentation from February 2024 describes the county’s ballot drop boxes: “Six locations in the county. As of May, all will have a 24 hour drop box. All have camera surveillance, and capabilities will improve over time.” Who operates those cameras, what they keep and who can view it are not stated, and “capabilities will improve over time” is an intention to expand that nothing else in the record describes.

There are no plate readers anywhere in this county’s record. The searches for ALPR, automated license plate, Flock and Vigilant all return nothing across 529 machine readable documents. The one mention of a license plate is a photograph caption from 1975, of a Trojan nuclear plant superintendent fixing a “TROJAN” vanity plate to a car. Against that, OpenStreetMap contributors have mapped two plate readers in the county. Those are community reported, we never merge them with agency records, and nothing we read says whose they are.

Two things that look like findings and are not. A Scappoose fire chief gave the Board a presentation on a drone project in August 2023, and that single sentence is the entire published trace of it. And the county’s largest recurring federal award, the Urban Area Security Initiative, sounds like a surveillance program and is not one here: the 2024 agreement is for community emergency response team supplies.

We read 529 of 543 documents from three of the county’s eighteen meeting calendars, 2023 to 2026. Fourteen are scans a search cannot read. Everything before 2023, the other fifteen calendars, and all six cities are unread.

A note on how this county’s record has to be read. Its published documents carry an OCR’d text layer that mangles numbers, turning a dollar sign into a 5 or an S, so “$40,000.00” appears in the text as “540,000.00”. Words come through cleanly and searching works. Every figure on this page was read off the original page image rather than the text, because the text cannot be trusted for numbers.