Keep plate readers out. Put every other surveillance decision in public.

Scope, first

Every department. Not one department.

This is a rule about how the City spends money and collects information — so it applies to the City, all of it. Any department, agency, board or division. Not a police policy with a wider name.

That’s not a softening. It matches how surveillance equipment actually arrives in a small city: a public safety grant, a vendor’s free pilot, a facilities-security line item, a downtown “smart” infrastructure package, a code enforcement drone bought to photograph roofs. Different budgets and departments shouldn’t mean different levels of public accountability.

A fair objection, worth answering directly: broader scope means more departments have paperwork. The counterweight is that the paperwork is only triggered by an actual surveillance acquisition — a department that isn’t buying surveillance equipment never files anything. For most of City Hall the ordinance is invisible.

For automated plate readers

One clear prohibition

The City may not acquire, install, operate, contract for, or accept data from an automated license plate reader system. This is the one place the ordinance says no outright rather than saying “not without a public vote.”

The final legal draft controls the exact scope — whether it reaches acquisition, operation, contracting, access to outside networks, and receipt of data. This page will follow the draft.

For everything else

Seven requirements before the City says yes

• A public hearing and a recorded vote, first

  Before the City applies for a grant, accepts a donation, buys, borrows, contracts for, or materially expands covered surveillance technology — it goes to the Council, in public, with room for written and spoken testimony. No public approval, no acquisition.

• The homework published three weeks early

  Two documents go up on the City website at least 21 days before that hearing: what the technology does and what it costs, and a binding policy on how it may be used, who may see the data, and how long it’s kept. Residents get to read them before the room fills.

• A real standard, not a rubber stamp

  The Council may approve only if it finds the benefits outweigh the costs and the plan protects civil rights — including that it won’t fall harder on one neighborhood or group than another.

• Annual reporting with the bill attached

  Each approved technology gets a yearly public report: how it was used, who the data was shared with and under what legal standard, complaints received, audit results, and the full annual cost including staff time. If it stops meeting the standard, the Council can end it.

• Anything already in use gets reviewed too

  The rule isn’t only forward-looking. Equipment the City is already running comes back through the same public process within a set window, or it stops being used until it does.

• A vendor can’t sell the City secrecy

  The City can’t enter a contract that conflicts with the ordinance. A confidentiality clause can’t override public disclosure, Council oversight, or the public’s right to understand what a system does. This matters more than it sounds — secrecy clauses are standard in this industry.

• No buying or selling surveillance data

  The City can’t purchase privately collected surveillance data, and can’t hand City-collected data to a private company for money or other consideration.

Scope

“Surveillance technology” means more than cameras

The definition is written around capability rather than brand name, so it doesn’t go stale when the product does. It covers equipment that collects or analyzes information tied to identifiable people — among other things:

These examples explain the category; the ordinance’s legal definition controls. Listing something isn’t an argument that Biddeford has it, or that it could never be justified — it’s an argument that the decision belongs in public, on the record, before the purchase order.

Just as important

What this ordinance does not do

• It doesn’t ban every technology

  It draws one bright line: automated license plate readers are prohibited. Other surveillance technology may still be approved — after the case is made in public and the Council votes on the record. Residents are often told that people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. A department with a sound case should have nothing to fear from putting its need, its costs, its contract and its safeguards on the public record.

• It doesn’t single out any department

  The plate reader prohibition applies to the City as a whole. The review process applies across every municipal entity the ordinance covers. It governs the power being acquired, not the job title of the person asking for it.

• It doesn’t cover ordinary equipment

  Office computers, printers, radios, city email, parking ticket devices, handheld cameras used openly — none of that is touched.

• It preserves a narrow emergency path

  A declared emergency may require temporary action. What it shouldn’t do is become permanent or routine without the same public review required for standing use.

The first question

Doesn’t Maine law already cover this?

Partly — and Maine’s law is genuinely strong. Title 29-A §2117-A starts from a flat prohibition on automated plate reader use, carves out narrow exceptions for the Department of Transportation, State Police commercial vehicle screening, and law enforcement, caps retention of non-investigative data at 21 days, and makes a violation a Class E crime. Maine is the only state that bars private individuals from using them outright.

But that is a floor, not a local oversight system. Nothing in it requires a Biddeford hearing before the City acquires anything, a published impact report, annual public reporting, or any routine way for residents to verify compliance. Its law-enforcement exception is exactly the door a municipal purchase would come through.

And a criminal penalty only operates after a violation is detected, investigated and prosecuted. It doesn’t answer the question in front of the Council: should Biddeford create this capability at all?

29-A M.R.S. §2117-A. Status checked August 2026.

Where Flock comes in

Biddeford can decide before the pressure arrives

Worth stating plainly, because some campaigns imply otherwise: there is no plate reader proposal before the Biddeford City Council. No contract, no pilot, no agenda item that we know of. We’re responding before the first proposal sets the terms of the debate.

Flock Safety is a plate reader vendor that sells to cities on subscription, and its expansion across the country has been covered heavily enough that a lot of people now know what these systems do — a searchable record of where ordinary people drive, queried by agencies far outside Maine, overseen by a free-text field. That awareness is the opening. It is easier to explain why a rule is needed while the example is fresh in people’s minds.

So the honest framing is this: plate readers are how the conversation started, not what the ask is limited to.

Vendors do add guardrails, and they may reduce some kinds of misuse. They don’t answer whether the database should exist. A system can work exactly as designed and still make ordinary movement searchable.

The obvious question

Why now, if nothing’s on the agenda?

Because this is the only moment when the question can be decided on its merits.

Once a specific proposal exists, the debate stops being about how the City should make these decisions and becomes about that proposal — with a vendor in the room, a department that has already committed to it, a grant with a deadline, and a council under pressure to give an answer. Good process is very hard to write in that environment, and it looks like an obstruction tactic when you try.

Written now, the City can draw one clear line around plate readers and set a fair process for everything else — without unwinding a contract, and without accusing anyone of anything. Nobody’s budget is being cut. No department is being investigated.

The alternative isn’t neutrality. It’s waiting until the first surveillance decision arrives on somebody else’s timetable, with a salesperson in the room and a deadline attached.

Send a letter

Reading the actual text

Where this comes from

The structure above follows a model surveillance-oversight ordinance that’s been adopted, in various forms, by cities and counties around the country since 2016. We’ve described it in plain terms here; the model text itself runs to fourteen sections and includes enforcement provisions, whistleblower protections, and rules about evidence collected in violation of the ordinance.

If you want to read the source text before you write to the Council, or you’re a councilor who wants the full draft rather than a summary, get in touch through the action page and we’ll send it.