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Kittitas County Sheriff | Flock Safety license plate readers

Kittitas County's plate readers were recorded here as a city story until the board's own agendas were read. The county contracted with Flock in March 2025 for $66,500, two weeks after the same item was removed from consideration, and then agreed with itself over where to put the cameras.

At a glance

What was contracted
A contract between the Flock Group, Inc. and the Kittitas County Sheriff's Office for adding Flock cameras and the data-sharing capabilities of the system in Kittitas County [1] [2]
The money
$66,500.00, recorded in the minutes of 4 March 2025 [2]
What happened on 18 February 2025
The same contract reached the consent agenda and the minutes carry it followed by "ITEM REMOVED FROM CONSIDERATION". The board removed a consent item that day on a 3-0 vote [3] [4]
Where the cameras stand
County-owned right-of-way. On 20 May 2025 the board acknowledged an agreement between the Sheriff's Office and the Public Works Department for its use to install Flock Safety cameras [5]
How many cameras, and where
not stated in any agenda or minutes line we read. The contract itself is not published with the board record [6]
Retention, sharing terms, or a written policy
none found in the county's agenda record. The agenda language names data-sharing as part of what was bought and says nothing about its limits [6]
Registration under RCW 10.130
not established. The statute requires agencies operating plate readers to register with the Attorney General, and nothing in this county's record shows whether that happened [6]

How it happened

  1. Debate

    The contract is removed from consideration

    The Flock contract appears on the Board of County Commissioners consent agenda. The minutes record the item followed by "ITEM REMOVED FROM CONSIDERATION", and record that a consent item was removed by motion before the agenda was approved 3-0. The minutes are a scanned image and give no reason for the removal. [3] [4]

  2. Decision

    It returns two weeks later and is acknowledged at $66,500

    The same request is back on the consent agenda in the same words. The minutes list it among the acknowledged items, as a contract between the Flock Group, Inc. and the Sheriff's Office in the amount of $66,500.00 for adding Flock cameras and data-sharing capabilities. A different consent item was removed that day. [1] [2]

  3. Deployment

    The Sheriff's Office and Public Works agree over the right-of-way

    The board acknowledges an agreement between the Kittitas County Sheriff's Office and the Kittitas County Public Works Department for use of county owned right-of-way to install Flock Safety cameras. It is the clearest statement in the county's record that these are county cameras on county ground. [5]

A county plate reader system that this site had recorded as a city one

Until the county’s own agendas were read, the Kittitas page said the plate reader story here was municipal: Ellensburg’s police running a Flock system, and a man charged with stealing three of the city of Kittitas’s cameras in a protest against government surveillance. All true, and all of it about cities.

The county has its own. On 4 March 2025 the Board of County Commissioners acknowledged a contract between Flock Group, Inc. and the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office for adding Flock cameras and the data-sharing capabilities of the system, at $66,500.00.

The two weeks before that

The same contract, in the same words, was on the consent agenda on 18 February 2025. The minutes of that meeting carry the line and then four words:

“ITEM REMOVED FROM CONSIDERATION”

The board removed a consent item by motion that day, 3-0, before approving the agenda. The minutes do not say why, and no other document we read says either. Two weeks later the item came back and passed with the rest of the consent agenda.

A consent agenda is where routine business goes to be approved in one motion, and any member can pull an item out of it for discussion. That is the mechanism working. What the record does not carry is the discussion, if there was one.

Where the cameras stand

On 20 May 2025 the board acknowledged an agreement between the Sheriff’s Office and the county’s own Public Works Department, for use of county owned right-of-way to install Flock Safety cameras.

Two county departments agreeing with each other is not a controversy. It is worth reading because of what it settles: these cameras are on county ground, put there by the county, under a contract the county signed. The number of them is not in the record.

What the county has not published

Not how many cameras. Not where they are. Not how long the data is kept, or which agencies are on the other side of the data-sharing the agenda names.

Washington answered part of that question at the state level. RCW 10.130 took effect on 30 March 2026: plate readers are unlawful except as the statute provides, data is held 21 days, and agencies that operate them register with the Attorney General. From 1 December 2027 those agencies publish annual reports on their own websites listing camera locations and who they share with.

Nothing in Kittitas County’s record shows whether this office registered. That is the first question in the county’s records queue.

Reading the record here

The county’s agendas are clean digital text and are quoted above. Its minutes are photographs of pages put through OCR, and the OCR is poor enough that the header of one extracts as KTTTITAS COT NTY, VilASHTNGTON. The $66,500 figure is legible in the 4 March minutes and is reported as a figure. No sentence on this page is quoted from a Kittitas County minutes file.

On the map

The community has mapped 32 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

What you can do

Show up

Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Kittitas County.

What we have documented in Kittitas County →

Protect yourself

Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.

Surveillance Self-Defense →

Sources

  1. 1.
    Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners agenda, 4 March 2025, consent agenda · Meeting record · · accessed
  2. 2.
    Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners minutes, agenda session, 4 March 2025. A scanned image; the dollar figure is read from it and nothing on this page is quoted from it · Meeting record · · accessed
  3. 3.
    Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners agenda, 18 February 2025, consent agenda · Meeting record · · accessed
  4. 4.
    Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners minutes, agenda session, 18 February 2025. A scanned image · Meeting record · · accessed
  5. 5.
    Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners agenda, 20 May 2025, consent agenda · Meeting record · · accessed
  6. 6.
    Orwell Index corpus scan of all 256 dated Kittitas County Board of County Commissioners agendas published since 2016, plus three minutes files pulled by date: 263 documents, 263 readable, 1,159,296 characters, all canary-verified · Primary document · · accessed

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