Wasco County

Someone asked. That is what makes this county worth reading.

On 3 December 2025 the county’s Emergency Manager brought the Board a state grant to buy a drone and a trailer mounted generator. From the minutes:

“Vice Chair Brady asked if the drone will cause privacy issues with the public. Mr. McClellan stated that the sheriff’s office will follow all state and federal laws concerning drones and usage of drones.”

The question is rarer in this coverage than the drone is. The answer was an assurance of legal compliance rather than a policy, which is the same shape as Benton County, whose Sheriff’s own page calls drone use strictly regulated and links no rule. There is no usage policy, no retention period and no deployment restriction anywhere in what we read.

The equipment schedule attached to the same minutes says what was bought:

“Uncrewed Aerial System DJI Matrice 30T Includes: Aircraft, RC Plus Controller, Payload: Laser Range Finder, 12MP Wide and 48 MP Zoom Camera, 640x512 Radiometric Thermal, BS30 Charging Station”

A 48 megapixel zoom camera and a 640 by 512 radiometric thermal sensor. Worth stating plainly: thermal imaging sees in darkness and finds people by body heat, and a 48 megapixel zoom resolves detail at distance. That is a search and rescue specification. It is also a surveillance specification. The capability does not change with the intention behind it.

The aircraft is owned by the state, maintained and operated by Wasco County, and shared regionally. Which agency is accountable for any particular flight is not answerable from this record.

Nine months later, a second drone purchase went the other way. From a September 2026 board packet, on a Homeland Security grant:

“The originally approved project included the procurement of an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS). Due to evolving federal requirements, funding restrictions, and procurement concerns surrounding UAS equipment and domestic supply-chain compl”

The sentence breaks there because the source page does. The award was reallocated, $20,412 of drone equipment becoming mobile dispatch center outfitting. This is the American Security Drone Act reaching a small Oregon county. The same law shows up as boilerplate in other counties’ contracts; here it actually did something, and it did it to a federally funded purchase in a county that had already bought a Chinese made aircraft on a state grant nine months earlier.

One more funding route, which we have not seen anywhere else. From a March 2026 packet on a solar development:

“BrightNight will agree to supplement funding to increase JF RFPD and SWCA Fire and EMS alerting and communications capabilities, drone program and camera system to improve Fire and EMS incident awareness, location and response over the 13626 acres solar farm footprint.”

A private energy developer offering to fund public safety drone and camera capability as part of a land use agreement, scoped to its own footprint. Not a grant, not a budget line, a developer condition. Whether it was accepted is not established in what we read.

There are no plate readers in this county’s record. The single mention of a license plate is the Vice Chair asking whether a 2010 crack sealer up for surplus auction “was not a vehicle but just equipment that has a title and license plate.”

We read the Board of County Commissioners for 2025 and 2026, 79 of 80 documents. The last one is a scan with no text in it. The county’s archived agendas page, and everything before 2025, are unread.

Before this page, Wasco County had no entry in any surveillance dataset we use.