El Paso County Sheriff | The plate readers border money bought

El Paso County did not decide to start reading license plates. It applied for a border security grant, and the grant paid for plate readers.

Operation Stonegarden is a Federal Emergency Management Agency program, administered in Texas through the Office of the Governor, that reimburses local law enforcement for working alongside the United States Border Patrol. El Paso County is its applicant and its fiduciary here, and has been for the whole of the period its meeting record covers. The awards run between one and two and a half million dollars a year. Most of the money is overtime and fuel. A small part of it, in some years, is equipment, and that is where the county’s plate readers are.

The purchases

The first mention of a plate reader in the county’s record is not a purchase. It is a request for more time. On 25 November 2013 the Commissioners Court approved an extension of the 2011 Stonegarden grant so the Sheriff’s Office could finish buying equipment, and the item’s background names the equipment: license plate readers.

Three readers arrived the following July, from 3M, for $47,600. The purchase was item N of the consent agenda, bought on a Houston-Galveston Area Council cooperative contract. Cooperative purchasing is how a Texas county buys without a bid: Chapter 271 of the Local Government Code says buying this way satisfies any state law requiring competitive bids. Nothing about the equipment was published in advance, because there was no bid notice to publish it in.

After that the purchases live inside the grant budgets. The 2018 budget, approved on 29 October 2018, carried $247,289.20 of equipment, and two of its lines are plate readers: one reader with software and maintenance for the Anthony Police Department at $31,043, and four renewal software licenses covering four Sheriff’s Office vehicles for two years at $24,306.52. The 2020 budget listed four more licenses at $31,550. Both appear under the Authorized Equipment List code 030E-01-ALPR, which is the federal catalog number for a plate reader, on a page of a spreadsheet attached to a grant item.

Then the trailers. In December 2019 the Court accepted $115,483.27 of supplemental 2017 Stonegarden funding, and the whole explanation is one sentence: “The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office was offered supplemental funding to purchase a LPR trailer.” In June 2021 it bought another, from Vigilant Solutions, for $56,060, on a cooperative contract, as item M of the consent agenda, charged to the 2019 Stonegarden capital account. In September 2024 it renewed hosting for a trailer at $49,995, charged to the 2021 Stonegarden account, as item AQ of the consent agenda.

Two agreements never reached the Court at all. The county’s own contract register lists a Vigilant Solutions License Plate Recognition Enterprise Service Agreement for one year and a License Plate Recognition LPR Data Integration Service Program for two, both under the Sheriff, both recorded as approved by the Chief Administrator.

The grant asked for a policy

The Office of the Governor attaches its Grantee Standard Conditions and Responsibilities to these awards, and the county files them with the item. Section 7.3 is about plate readers:

Any grantee requesting funds for Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) must have a written policy regarding use of the ALPR and related data retention. Subrecipients also must enter into a User Agreement with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Crime Records Division to gain access to the Texas Automated License Plate Reader (LPR) Database so that data may be shared among all participating local, state, and federal agencies.

So the grant contemplates two things. A policy saying what the readers are for and how long the reads are kept. And a pipe into a state database where the reads are shared with every participating local, state and federal agency.

We read the 1,545 readable agendas and sets of minutes this Court has published from 21 October 2013 to 15 September 2026. Neither the policy nor the user agreement appears in any of them. That describes what the Commissioners Court has published and nothing else: the Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Department of Public Safety hold records this does not reach.

Who the readers work for

The grant’s own operations plan is explicit about the arrangement. The plan filed with the October 2019 item describes enhanced day and night patrols, surges to gather intelligence, and a Border Patrol Station Integrated Planning Team that local agencies sit on. Under the heading for the Anthony Police Department, a town of a few thousand people in the county’s north west corner, one line reads: “The Anthony Police Department will support Border Patrol with LPR operations”.

Anthony has its own plate reader, bought with the same grant money, and its own place in the plan.

The map shows something else

Volunteers have mapped 271 plate readers inside El Paso County, and 205 of them are tagged Flock Safety. The county’s purchases account for none of those. The word Flock does not appear once in thirteen years of this Court’s published agendas and minutes. Those cameras belong to the cities, and the cities keep their own records, which this pass did not read.