Santa Cruz City Council reopens its debate over license plate readers
Two years ago this month, Santa Cruz City Council briefly paused plans to lease 14 automated license plate cameras from a security company in Atlanta called Flock Safety, paid for with the help of an $84,000 grant from the federal Department of Homeland Security.
The city’s police chief told the council that the cameras would be used primarily to locate stolen vehicles and missing persons and to investigate serious crimes. Some elected officials endorsed the plan. “To me, this tool is something our local law enforcement can use to help keep us safe,” Councilmember Renée Golder told a November 2023 city council meeting.
However, privacy advocates raised enough concerns about the broad array of data that could be captured by the cameras that the council voted to delay its decision on the city’s lease with Flock Safety until the following month. The technology “tells us nothing and records everything,” Lee Brokaw, a representative of a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the council.
While the city council ultimately approved the agreement with Flock Safety in December 2023, that two-year-old debate has resurfaced at city council this month, when Santa Cruz Police Chief Bernie Escalante acknowledged that data from the city’s license plate cameras had been shared inadvertently with law enforcement agencies in other states as part of a national database operated by Flock Safety, in violation of a California law.
Now, Santa Cruz is hitting the pause button on some aspects of its agreement with Flock Safety once again, including withdrawing from a statewide data-sharing service, in order to review how local data is being accessed and used. The council will discuss the results of the review on Dec. 9, when, Councilmember Susie O’Hara said, elected officials plan to “weigh the continued use of the system against the investigative benefits it provides.”
The news out of Santa Cruz follows an acknowledgement earlier this month by Capitola police that the city’s licence plate data had been shared with federal immigration authorities through searches conducted by other law enforcement agencies that had access to the system. The police department’s chief, Sarah Ryan, pointed to ways police had used the data to solve serious crimes, including sexual assault, but acknowledged that local law enforcement agencies are still facing growing pains when it comes to fully understanding the complexity of the Flock system.
Privacy advocates say the disclosures by local law enforcement agencies across the country about inadvertent violations of the law show how hard it is for a single city to create rules that contain a system built for data-sharing. The ACLU of Massachusetts reported that Flock’s standard contract gives the company a “worldwide” license to share local data for “investigative purposes,” even when a department tries to restrict access to its own officers, unless stricter terms are negotiated. Flock says local agencies own their data, pointing to public transparency portals and audit tools as evidence the technology can be used with civil-liberties safeguards.
The Santa Cruz City Council will return to the issue in a few weeks. That Dec. 9 meeting will test whether the city believes new guardrails that Flock has put in place to restrict how data is shared among agencies that have access to its network are enough to salvage a system that some members of the city council already had reservations about — and will show how far local leaders are willing to go to balance public safety and privacy concerns. — Tamsin McMahon
POINTS FOR PARTICIPATION
The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and the city councils of Capitola, Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley and Watsonville are on hiatus this week.
OF NOTE
Mid-County PG&E repairs drag on a month after community meeting: In late October, representatives from Pacific Gas & Electric met with a crowd of frustrated Mid-County residents who had experienced near-constant power outages since the summer in a community meeting that District 2 County Supervisor Kim De Serpa helped organize.
The utility company said fixes were on the way, with a substation near Aptos High School on the verge of completion. In a recent newsletter to her constituents, De Serpa said that the company is optimistic that the worst outages will now be over, but added that PG&E’s repairs to the substation were delayed due to backordered parts, and completed on Oct. 28, rather than the Oct. 15 target date. Brief outages could still occur, but power is expected to return quickly if they do happen.
De Serpa said she expects to pursue another meeting with the company in the spring to continue working on improving service, safety and communication.
Gearing up to fight offshore oil: The Department of Interior has started accepting public comments on its plan to sell offshore oil drilling leases along the California Coast. Elected officials say they’re getting ready to fight offshore drilling in the courts and rally coastal residents against the plan. Coastal congressmembers railed against the Trump administration proposal to sell offshore oil leases. Meanwhile, a coalition of local governments is signing on coastal cities and counties one by one to lobby against the plan.
Keeley and Koenig’s rail-trail “peace deal”: The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission has been hit with sticker shock recently when it comes to plans to launch both a future passenger train service and continue building the Coastal Rail Trail. While the train’s estimated $4.3 billion price tag might be a distant concern for the commission, the $228 million cost to start construction on an 8-mile stretch of the Coastal Rail Trail from the Santa Cruz Wharf to Aptos is more pressing. The RTC is short about $70 million for the project, possibly jeopardizing a state grant of nearly $100 million that requires shovels in the ground by 2027. Now, two local political leaders who have been seen to be on opposite sides of the train debate say they have reached a “peace deal” on the issue. But it’s one that not all sides of the issue may be happy with. Max Chun has the details.
Unionized labor on Watsonville projects: Watsonville’s city council voted to reinstate its project labor agreement, which sets hiring parameters for contractors who work on city infrastructure. The construction trades union had asked the city to make updates to the rules for pay, benefits and hours for unionized construction projects. The vote represents a compromise between city officials and union leaders because it exempts projects that get no bids (mainly water and sewer projects) and expires in three years.
Battery storage in Santa Cruz County: The board of supervisors decided to delay a vote on battery storage plant regulations until January. In the next draft of the regulations, the board wants ongoing soil and water monitoring, and guidelines for chemical runoff, battery disposal and fire department access. New Leaf Energy, which wants to break ground on a new battery storage facility outside of Watsonville, said it can wait for a “viable local permitting path,” but at some point it will have to consider bypassing local rules and going to the state Energy Commission to get the project approved.
No temporary bike bridge for Murray Street: The Santa Cruz City Council weighed opening the rail bridge to bikes and pedestrians and determined the path presented too much liability. City staff said the project wouldn’t comply with engineering standards so it wouldn’t be insurable, which would leave the city vulnerable to a costly lawsuit. The bridge is slated to be closed for 10 more weeks before it opens to one-way vehicular traffic. It’s scheduled to close again next year for another three months.