SB 1516

Senate Bill 1516 was approved on 31 March 2026 and took effect the same day under its emergency clause.^[2] It is the newest license plate reader statute on this site, and in several places the strictest. Because it passed in 2026, its sections had not yet been assigned Oregon Revised Statutes numbers when we read it; the citation is to the session law.^[2]

The default rule is a prohibition: a law enforcement agency “may not use an automated license plate recognition system or captured license plate data” except as the Act provides.^[1] Captured data not tied to a court proceeding or an ongoing criminal investigation “may be retained for no more than 30 days”.^[1] Before deploying a system, an agency must establish and publish policies for its use, storage and retention, and the data must be protected with at minimum end-to-end encryption.^[1]

Section 6 is the part a resident can use. A vendor that supplies an agency’s system must provide the agency with the number of cameras installed, the location of any fixed system, the number of searches run, a list of every agency with access, the number of authorized users, the number of unique vehicles captured and the number of alerts generated.^[1] Those figures exist because the statute requires them to exist, which makes them the natural target of a public records request under Oregon’s public records law.

The comparison with California is direct. California’s SB 34 requires a published policy and access logging but sets no maximum retention period; Oregon’s SB 1516 requires the policy and caps retention of non-case data at thirty days. What neither statute does is decide whether a network should exist. That remains a local decision, taken by the bodies whose records these county pages document.