Travis County Sheriff | Flock cameras in county right of way, refused

On 10 January 2023 the Travis County Commissioners Court was asked to let a homeowners association install six plate reader cameras on county roads. The agenda request describes the ask plainly: “Rob Roy on the Creek Homeowners Association, Inc. requests to enter into a License Agreement for the installation of six automatic license plate reading cameras placed on Furlong Drive, Newhall Lane, and Beardsley Lane, within the right-of-way”.^[3] The reason given was “neighborhood security concerns, such as car break-ins and theft”.^[3]

Commissioner Ann Howard moved to approve. The minutes record the motion as “Approve the licensing agreement between Travis County and Rob Roy on the Creek to install Flock cameras” in county right of way, and then the Clerk’s note: “The Motion died for lack of a Second.”^[1]

What the county had actually reviewed

The department that brought the item forward, Transportation and Natural Resources, had looked at where the poles would stand. Its staff member told the Court that the department checks that a device does not block sight distance or sit in the clear recovery zone, and that it had not considered privacy or any other issue.^[2] The agenda request says the same in one line: the improvements “do not reduce sight distance conditions or place unacceptable hazards in the clear recovery zone”.^[3]

The argument

Commissioner Brigid Shea said the vote was about allowing a private surveillance device on public right of way for the first time, that it would set a precedent, and that many more communities would follow. She said her questions about how a hotlist is compiled, and how quickly a plate comes off it when charges are dropped, had not been answered.^[2]

Commissioner Jeffrey Travillion said he would vote against it. He spoke about pretext stops, about having had a gun pointed at him by an officer, and about what he called the ominous consequences of things that look innocuous.^[2]

Commissioner Howard argued the other way. The Sheriff’s Office uses the technology in communities on both sides of I-35, she said, and a camera that captures every plate is a check on prejudice rather than an instrument of it, because the reader does not choose whom to photograph.^[2]

County Judge Andy Brown said he was not prepared to support it that day, because the County Attorney’s Office had put questions to Flock, to the association and to the Sheriff’s Office that had not come back in writing.^[2] The association’s president told the Court the neighborhood had surveyed its members, that two thirds wanted at least one camera, and that the cost worked out at about $100 per homeowner in a community of 140.^[2]

What it decided, and what it did not

The Court did not vote the request down. Nobody seconded the motion, so there was no vote at all, and the association’s request simply ended there. The decision closed the county’s right of way to this one installation. It did not touch cameras on private property, which members said residents may put up and which they understood other Rob Roy subdivisions already have, and it did not change what the Sheriff’s Office can see: the same agenda request records that the office receives hotlist alerts from Flock cameras under a separate memorandum of understanding.^[3]