Curry County

Early in 2026 someone broke into the Curry County Fairgrounds and took thousands of dollars of equipment. By August the Board had a bid in front of it for about forty cameras.

From the agenda item cover sheet for 25 August 2026, submitted by the Fair and Event Center department:

“Motion to approve the bid with Pacific Office Automation in the amount of $77,000 to purchase camera equipment and licensing for the Curry County Fairgrounds property.”

The justification, with the county’s own typo:

“There are currently no security camaras at the Fairgrounds. Staff believes the installation of a camera system is necessary to better protect staff, visitors, facilities and County Property. Cameras strategically placed throughout the grounds would assist in monitoring activity, deter theft, vandalism, unauthorized access and provide documentation should an incident occur.”

Zero to roughly forty in one agenda item. The county says it has no cameras at the fairgrounds today, and the attached quote covers fifteen physical units carrying around forty image sensors: outdoor multisensor cameras at 4K, zoom lenses, fisheye and telephoto bullet cameras.

Three things in that quote are worth telling a reader plainly. The vendor is Verkada, whose cameras are managed in the cloud rather than recorded on site. Retention is a property of the hardware here, with every line reading “Max 30 Days”. And the licensing is five year, which makes this a recurring commitment rather than a one off purchase, at a public event venue.

We do not know whether the Board approved it. This is an agenda item and a suggested motion. The minutes we have for 25 August 2026 are for a short special meeting that does not reach the item, and six documents in this county’s record mention both cameras and the fairgrounds, all of them agendas. So the accurate statement is that Curry County’s Board was asked to buy this system, not that it did.

Verkada also supplied the jail camera system in Union County in 2023. Two Oregon counties, one cloud camera vendor, three years apart, and neither purchase appears in any surveillance dataset.

Separately, in July 2026 the Board declared its intent to pursue “an integrated Motorola Solutions public safety communications tower system modernization”, bought through a cooperative contract led by the State of Washington. This is radio infrastructure and we record it as radio infrastructure. Nothing in the packet describes plate reading, video, or any capability pointed at the public. It is worth knowing about because the vendor also sells surveillance equipment, because cooperative contracts are a procurement route that skips a local bidding process, and because a communications modernization is the kind of umbrella that can later carry more than radios. Nothing in this record says it does.

There are no plate readers in this county’s record, but that absence is weak and we would rather say so than lean on it. Eighty seven of the 507 documents in our window are scans with no text in them, which a person can read and a search cannot. Two plate readers are mapped in this county by OpenStreetMap contributors, and nothing tells us whose they are.

One note for anyone trying to read this county’s own archive. Eighteen sets of minutes on the county’s page are linked with an uppercase file extension, and the server refuses those links with an error while serving the identical file when the extension is lowercase. We found this because our fetcher failed on exactly those eighteen. A resident clicking the county’s own link to the minutes of 4 January 2023 gets the error too. We read them by correcting the address.

We read 420 machine readable documents from 2023 to 2026, out of 1,107 the county publishes back to 2017. There is no city record here for Brookings, Gold Beach or Port Orford.