WHITEHALL — The license-plate cameras that watch traffic in Trempealeau County were set in motion by a two-line email. “I would like to have that meeting,” Sheriff Brett Semingson wrote to a Flock Safety salesman on July 29, 2024. “I have both the 13th and 15th open as of now.”
Sixteen months of county emails, contracts and invoices, produced under Wisconsin’s public records law and reviewed by the Pioneer, trace what happened next: a sales pitch in August, a line item in the sheriff’s 2025 budget request, a committee briefing with no vote, and a contract signed by the sheriff over DocuSign three days after the county budget passed. At no point in the records does any elected body vote on whether Trempealeau County should have automatic license-plate readers at all.
That absence is now the center of the county’s loudest political fight. On July 8, Supervisor Andy Parrish came to the Law Enforcement Committee prepared to argue for removing the cameras. By his own public account, he never got the chance.
The paper trail starts with the meeting the sheriff booked for mid-August 2024. A calendar reminder shows “Trempealeau County + Flock” on the afternoon of August 15. At 4:31 that same afternoon, Semingson emailed the county finance office. “Please add $12,750 to the investigator line for 2025 budget,” he wrote. “This would be for the purchase and installation of three Flock cameras.” He noted that other agencies had solicited donations to pay for theirs, “but I want it included in the budget in case we do not get any donations.”
“I just want to hear it from you before I move ahead with my Flock Camera project.”
Sheriff Brett Semingson, email to the county administrator, Nov. 13, 2024
The next morning, Flock salesman Nathan Ross sent the details: $3,000 per camera per year, plus a one-time installation fee — $150 on existing infrastructure, $650 on a Flock pole along a county road, $1,250 on a crash-rated pole where the state requires one. Ross also described the incentive built into Flock’s pricing: buy at least six cameras, and the county would unlock access to Flock’s network of more than 1,000 cameras across Wisconsin and others nationwide. Fewer than six, and deputies would see only their own.
The cameras made one documented appearance before an elected body ahead of the purchase. The Law Enforcement Committee’s minutes for September 11, 2024 list a discussion item: “Possible Purchase Flock Cameras 2025 Budget.” The minutes describe the system as “artificial intelligence license plate readers where no personal information is collected,” used “for cases of crime and missing persons,” and record that the “Sheriff would like to purchase three camera systems.” The whole meeting ran 32 minutes. No motion on the cameras was made, and none appears in any committee minutes the Pioneer reviewed before or since.
Whether a license-plate reader collects personal information is, at minimum, a live question. The agreement the county signed spells out that the system retains vehicle plate reads — which car passed which camera, when — in a searchable database for 30 days. The records production also included Flock platform pages titled “Sent Requests” and “Received Requests,” dozens of pages listing data-sharing requests between agencies, though the copies produced are too faint to show which were granted.
The county board adopted the 2025 budget on November 12, with the camera money inside the sheriff’s budget. The next day Semingson emailed County Administrator Rebecca Glewen: “The LE Committee members told me the budget passed yesterday, pretty much as presented. I just want to hear it from you before I move ahead with my Flock Camera project.” On November 15, he signed. The agreement — three Falcon cameras, $11,650 for the first year, $20,650 over the deal — carries a 24-month initial term, a 24-month renewal term and a 30-day data-retention setting. Flock’s general counsel signed the same day. Page 15 of the agreement, as the county released it, is redacted.
The installation winter was small-town procurement at its most literal. One camera pole, the sheriff wrote in January, sat “next to Bob Niederkorn’s meat shop.” Galesville’s mayor, Tom Thatcher, gave permission to mount a camera on a city pole with one request: “Can you check with Todd Peterson to make sure the camera does not interfere with Christmas lights if possible.” By spring a chief deputy was flagging that the Highway 53 camera in Galesville seemed aimed at southbound traffic when the plan called for northbound.
The cameras went live in early April 2025 — and the public noticed before most of the courthouse did. On April 10, a records request about the “Flock Safety Camera System” landed, and county staff forwarding it had to ask the sheriff’s office: “Do we have a flock safety camera system or is there talk about getting them?” Semingson’s reply: “We do have them. They just went on-line this week.” That same day, Chief Deputy Wayne Dahl asked Flock whether camera locations were public records; Flock’s onboarding manager referred the question to the company’s legal team.
The system has since started growing. In August 2025, Dahl told Flock the office had put three more cameras into its 2026 budget proposal. In September, Glewen’s office noted the “flock cameras” still needed to be added to the county’s capital improvement plan.
Parrish, elected to the board since the cameras went in, has made their removal his signature cause. What happened when he brought it to the Law Enforcement Committee on July 8 is, for now, best documented by the participants themselves, since the county has not yet published the minutes. “Scott’s motion prevented me from even presenting my research,” Parrish wrote publicly afterward, describing a 4–1 vote, moved by Supervisor Scott Leonard after a Flock Safety presentation and before Parrish’s agenda time, that he says “killed any ability for me to approach this in the future.” The meeting grew heated enough that a recess was called — a detail confirmed by one of Parrish’s sharpest critics, county Republican Party chairman Dave Estenson, who publicly condemned Parrish’s conduct as “beyond the pale” while others in the same comment threads defended him as the only supervisor willing to press the issue.
Strip away the noise, and the records leave the county where it started: with cameras that no elected body ever voted to install, and — if Parrish’s account of the July 8 motion holds — no scheduled path to a vote on removing them. The agreement the sheriff signed renews in 24-month terms. The cameras, meanwhile, keep reading plates.