Adams County

In September 2025 the Adams County Sheriff brought the commissioners two quotes from Axon. One was the plan the county already had, with a language translation feature and upgraded tasers. The other added drones.

The minutes of 9 September record both, and record that the board asked for a clean copy of the contract before deciding. The minutes of 10 September, the next day, record what it signed:

Commissioner Weise moved, Blankenship seconded, to authorize the Chairman sign Quote #Q-733225-45904AA, between Axon Enterprise, Inc. and Adams County, in the amount of $711,304.13.

Five years, about $142,000 a year, July 2026 to July 2030. The minutes do not say which of the two quotes that was, and no other document in the county’s record says either.

So the question of whether this county now flies drones is not one its published record can answer. That is not a complaint about the drafting. A motion that names a quote number and a price is ordinary, and a board that asks for a clean contract before signing is doing its job. It is a statement about what a resident reading the minutes afterwards can find out, which is the price but not the equipment.

One records request naming Quote #Q-733225-45904AA settles it, and it is the first item in this county’s queue.

What else the board record holds

The Axon relationship dates to June 2021, when the county first bought body worn cameras, tasers and in-car cameras. That contract expired at the end of 2025, and in September the county paid $1,000 to lock 2025 pricing into whatever came next.

In March 2026 the county’s E-911 coordinator briefed the board on what other jurisdictions charge for public records requests for body camera footage. That question, what it costs a resident to get the video, is live in Washington: Cowlitz County adopted a redaction fee schedule effective 1 January 2026.

In May 2026 the Sheriff reported the office had deployed Taser 10 systems, and in June the ten obsolete Taser 7 units were surplused by resolution and transferred to Garfield County. Garfield’s own website answers this project with a refusal, so the only public trace of that equipment moving is on the Adams side of it.

The county’s zoning code contains a small surprise: a rule for marijuana retailers requiring that the position of their security cameras “shall not intrude on the privacy of neighboring properties”. A written rule about where a private camera may point is rarer than it should be.

How much of this county we have read

All 316 documents the Board of Commissioners has published on its CivicClerk portal, every one of them machine-readable. Across all of them there is no plate reader, no Flock, no facial recognition and no camera registry, and because every document was readable and canary-verified, that absence holds for the record we read.

It reaches back to February 2025 and no further, because that is when the county’s portal starts. Adams County’s older record is not on it, and the domain this project had recorded for the county, www.co.adams.wa.us, no longer resolves at all.

The Atlas of Surveillance still records a single DJI Inspire drone at the Sheriff’s Office as of 2016, from the Bard College drone census. Nothing in the 316 documents mentions it.

What this record does not cover

Anything the board decided before February 2025. Othello and Ritzville’s police, whose plate readers are municipal and never merged into county counts.

Community contributors have mapped 10 devices across the county in OpenStreetMap. That count covers every agency and business at once and is never merged with anything above.