# Flock opponents plan to fill Council chambers Thursday. The contract they want canceled has a way out. **Published:** 2026-08-26T00:00:00.000Z **Source:** [The Lexington Times](https://lexington.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352619&GUID=35B2764B-92D7-4453-9106-EB2A1E30BA38&Options=info|&Search=) **AI-generated:** yes (claude-opus-5) **Canonical:** https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/flock-opponents-council-thursday-what-the-contract-says **License:** [CC BY-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) — You may republish this article, in full and unaltered, for free — including commercially — with credit to The Lexington Times and a link to the original.  (A resident addresses the Urban County Council during public comment on June 18, 2026, one of at least five meetings this year at which Lexingtonians have asked the Council to end its Flock Safety contract. (LFUCG / LEX TV meeting video)) Organizers with the Bluegrass chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America say they will hand the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council a demand letter Thursday night asking the city to cancel its contract with Flock Safety, take down all 125 automated license plate readers within six months and delete the data they have collected. The cameras are not on Thursday's agenda, and no vote on them is scheduled. But the five-year agreement Lexington signed with Flock in 2024 contains a clause that lets the city walk away on 30 days' notice at no cost — and the lever it turns on — appropriation — belongs to the Council. ## What Thursday actually is The Urban County Council meets Thursday, Aug. 27, at 6 p.m. in Council Chambers at 200 E. Main St. The [published agenda](https://lexington.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352619&GUID=35B2764B-92D7-4453-9106-EB2A1E30BA38&Options=info|&Search=) runs 61 items and is headlined by second reading of the city's ad valorem tax ordinances. Flock is not among them. That matters for anyone planning to speak. Under the Council's [public comment rules](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/government/office-urban-county-council/council-committees/public-comment), comments on items that are on the agenda are heard at the beginning of the meeting; comments on everything else are heard at the end. Speakers who want to talk about Flock should plan to stay late. The rest of the mechanics: - Sign-ups open 30 minutes before the meeting and close 30 minutes after it starts. Digital sign-in stations sit just outside the Council Chamber. Arriving by 5:30 p.m. is the safe play. - Each speaker gets three minutes. Speakers who have signed up and are present may yield their time to someone else, up to a nine-minute maximum for a single speaker. - Spoken remarks only. Presentations, videos and personal devices are not permitted. Printed handouts may be distributed to the Council — organizers on r/lexington are advising 16 copies, one for the mayor and each member — but may not be held up or displayed during a comment. - Can't make it? The Council's shared inbox is CouncilMembers-Email@lexingtonky.gov, and individual members are listed on the city's site. Emails are not read into the record. One caution about the flyer circulating on Reddit, which says the cameras “are up for debate.” They are not, in the formal sense. As one commenter on the r/lexington thread pointed out, there is no pending Flock item and therefore no action for the Council to take or decline to take Thursday. The organizers' answer, in the same thread, was that a number of people had already planned to speak and that turning out together beats going alone: “Strength in numbers.” ## What the demand letter asks The [letter](https://dsabluegrass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Deflock_Letterhead-1.pdf), signed by the chapter and posted on its website, makes seven asks: cancel the Flock contract immediately; commit to no future contracts with Flock or other ALPR vendors; remove all cameras within six months; delete all collected ALPR data not tied to an active legal proceeding; ban ALPRs within six feet of public roads or city-owned land; zone private ALPRs, most tightly in residential areas; and require a search warrant before city authorities build — or use technology that builds — a surveillance profile on an individual. “The right to privacy is necessary for a free society, and ALPRs inherently contradict this right,” the letter says. It says the chapter, which it puts at more than 350 members, voted unanimously in May to bring the issue to the Council and the public. A companion [petition](https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/deflock-the-bluegrass) on Action Network had 279 signatures toward a stated goal of 1,000 as of Tuesday evening. ## The contract, and the door out of it Lexington's Flock program is in its fourth year. The Council authorized an installation agreement with Axon Enterprise and Flock in December 2021 (R-699-2021), then a $236,250 sole-source purchase of the license plate reader program in December 2022 (R-670-2022). The current deal is Contract #094-2024, approved as R-163-2024 on April 25, 2024. Its [order form](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/d03514f4-1f0d-4979-98eb-765967c8e36c.pdf) sets an effective date of March 1, 2024 and an initial term of 60 months — through Feb. 28, 2029 — covering 100 Flock Safety Falcon cameras at $352,404.11 in year one and $317,500 a year after that, for a contract total of $1,622,404.11. It renews automatically in 24-month increments unless one side gives notice at least 30 days before the term ends. Then it grew. In a [June 7, 2024 memo](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/71b00727-00b1-4ccd-9697-94bdcb1f8c96.pdf), Chief Lawrence Weathers asked the Council to add 25 cameras: $53,375 for the stub period ending Feb. 28, 2025, and “$400,000/Per Year (All 125 Cameras)” from March 1, 2025 through Feb. 28, 2029. The Council approved that in July 2024 (R-346-2024) and ratified the executed amendment in August (R-413-2024). Read quickly, the two resolutions look like two separate 25-camera expansions; the underlying paperwork shows they cover the same 25 cameras — a budgetary quote, then the signed version. The fleet is 125. Legistar's record of the April 25, 2024 approval shows no per-member roll call; the resolution moved on the docket. The nonprofit civic newsroom CivicLex [reported at the time](https://civiclex.org/weekly-posts/council-approves-five-year-lease-extension-for-flock-cameras) that District 1's Tayna Fogle cast the lone no vote. The clause that has drawn little attention is Section 11.16 of the [master services agreement](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/63eb4dd1-f90f-43e1-abf7-0912966ab7e5.pdf) Lexington signed. It reads: Notwithstanding any other provision of this Agreement, all obligations of the Customer under this Agreement which require the expenditure of funds are conditioned on the availability of funds appropriated for that purpose. Customer shall have the right to terminate this Agreement for non appropriation with thirty (30) days written notice without penalty or other cost. The city does not have to wait until February 2029, and it does not have to prove Flock breached anything. Under the contract's own terms, if the Council does not appropriate the money, the city may terminate on 30 days' written notice, without penalty. Appropriation is the Council's job. Whether members want to do that is a political question; whether they can is not. ## One claim worth checking The DeFlock campaign tells residents that “Lexington police don't even own this information about you; Flock does.” The contract says the opposite, in part. Section 4.1 provides that “all right, title and interest in the Customer Data, belong to and are retained solely by Customer,” and that Flock “does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” But the fuller picture is closer to the campaign's point than that sentence alone suggests. The data lives on Flock's cloud, not the city's servers. Flock owns the hardware outright (§10.1). Flock holds an “irrevocable, worldwide” license to use the data to run the service (§4.1), and a separate “perpetual, royalty-free” right to anonymize customer data and use it to train machine-learning models (§4.3). And §5.3 allows Flock to “access, use, preserve and/or disclose the Footage to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties” when legally required or when it has a good-faith belief that doing so is reasonably necessary. Ownership on paper is the city's. Custody, and a good deal of discretion, is Flock's. One other line in the file deserves a question at the podium. The order forms list a “Retention Period: 30 Days” — matching the retention limit LPD's public policy describes — while also billing Lexington for an “Extended data retention” add-on on all 125 cameras, described in the 2024 expansion quote as “Up to 1 Year.” The 2024 order form prices that add-on at $1,500 per camera, or $150,000 a year on the original 100. What Lexington is buying, and how long Lexington plate data is actually kept, is a fair thing to ask the police department to reconcile in public. ## What is on the agenda: three more police technology buys While Flock is not on Thursday's docket, three law enforcement technology items are — and comment on agenda items is heard at the _beginning_ of the meeting, not the end. - Resolution 17 would authorize a sole-source purchase of LeadsOnline NightHawk, described in Chief Weathers' July 31 memo as “an investigative data visualization and analysis software platform” that “combines digital evidence from multiple sources into a single, unified view.” Cost: not to exceed $7,000.01 in FY2027. - Resolution 30 would re-establish Magnet Forensics as a sole-source vendor and buy Magnet AXIOM and Magnet Witness, described as tools for “recovering digital evidence from smartphones, computers, external storage devices and the Cloud” and for “byte level analysis of video surveillance systems.” Cost: $26,320. - Resolution 14 would let the city apply for a $581,860 Kentucky Office of Homeland Security grant to buy three ICOR Technology Mini-CALIBER police robots. No local match is required. ## Where the Council stands No Council member has publicly called for ending the Flock contract; a search of the LFUCG meeting archive turned up no member taking a position on the program this year. The closest thing to a stated position this year came from Vice Mayor Dan Wu at the [June 2 General Government and Planning Committee meeting](https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6787?view_id=14&entrytime=2350), during a review of the city's new artificial intelligence policy, about 39 minutes in. “I've always said when it comes to technology, whether it's license plate readers or AI, I'm never afraid of technology or the tool,” Wu said. “What's important to us is creating the guidelines, the safeguards, the accountability, who has access to it, usage and things like that.” Residents have been showing up on this for a while. Amber Duke, then interim executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky, told the Council on Dec. 6, 2022 that “the ACLU of Kentucky does not support license plate readers such as Flock cameras.” On March 26 of this year, Isaac Looney asked the Council to make Lexington “an ALPR-free city.” Finley Van Hook warned the same night that ALPR litigation elsewhere meant “it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.” On April 30, Paige Hensley pointed out that the crime statistics on the city's own Flock page ran only through February 2022 — before the first camera was installed. Hudson Chamberlain spoke against the contract on May 28 and again on June 18, citing camera placement in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Elsewhere in Kentucky, the direction has turned. Fort Mitchell Mayor Greg Pohlgeers told a packed council meeting Aug. 17 that the Northern Kentucky city would shut off and remove its five readers immediately rather than renew a $34,000 contract, [according to the nonprofit NKyTribune](https://nkytribune.com/2026/08/fort-mitchell-hears-citizens-on-ebikes-flock-cameras-mayor-decides-to-discontinue-the-controversial-cameras/). “When you pull the curtain back on the cameras it gets a little scary,” Pohlgeers said. Fort Mitchell's minutes for that meeting had not been posted as of Tuesday. Lexington, with 125 readers and a contract running to 2029, is a far larger commitment than Fort Mitchell's five. It is also, as [we reported in July](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/lexington-flock-cameras-what-the-map-doesnt-show), one of the more transparent programs in the region — the city publishes a map of its reader locations and posts LPD's own audits. Whether that transparency is enough is exactly the argument scheduled to arrive in Council Chambers on Thursday, in three-minute increments, at the end of a very long agenda. _This report is based on the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council's published agenda and Legistar legislative record; the Flock Safety master services agreement, order form and amendments filed with Resolutions R-163-2024, R-346-2024 and R-413-2024; Lexington Police Department cover memos; the Bluegrass DSA demand letter and petition; LFUCG's published public comment rules; and Urban County Council meeting recordings in the LFUCG Granicus archive. The primary documents are linked above and below._ ## Sources - [LFUCG Legistar — Urban County Council agenda, Aug. 27, 2026](https://lexington.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1352619&GUID=35B2764B-92D7-4453-9106-EB2A1E30BA38&Options=info|&Search=) - [LFUCG — Council public comment rules](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/government/office-urban-county-council/council-committees/public-comment) - [LFUCG — Urban County Council members](https://www.lexingtonky.gov/government/office-urban-county-council/councilmembers) - [Bluegrass DSA — DeFlock demand letter (PDF)](https://dsabluegrass.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Deflock_Letterhead-1.pdf) - [Action Network — “DeFlock the Bluegrass” petition](https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/deflock-the-bluegrass) - [Flock Safety order form, Exhibit A (LFUCG Contract #094-2024, effective 3/1/2024)](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/d03514f4-1f0d-4979-98eb-765967c8e36c.pdf) - [Flock Safety master services agreement (LFUCG Contract #094-2024)](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/63eb4dd1-f90f-43e1-abf7-0912966ab7e5.pdf) - [LPD cover memo, June 7, 2024 — Flock amended contract quote (25 additional cameras)](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/71b00727-00b1-4ccd-9697-94bdcb1f8c96.pdf) - [LPD cover memo, July 31, 2026 — LeadsOnline NightHawk](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/71725529-2d66-4b47-b8f1-b267cd214630.pdf) - [LPD cover memo, Aug. 4, 2026 — Magnet Forensics AXIOM/Witness](https://legistar1.granicus.com/Lexington/attachments/25a4c253-e54c-4218-9657-b9bd1a2ae4ce.pdf) - [LFUCG Granicus — General Government & Planning Committee, June 2, 2026 (39:19)](https://lfucg.granicus.com/player/clip/6787?view_id=14&entrytime=2350) - [CivicLex — Council approves five-year lease extension for Flock cameras](https://civiclex.org/weekly-posts/council-approves-five-year-lease-extension-for-flock-cameras) - [NKyTribune — Fort Mitchell mayor discontinues Flock cameras](https://nkytribune.com/2026/08/fort-mitchell-hears-citizens-on-ebikes-flock-cameras-mayor-decides-to-discontinue-the-controversial-cameras/) - [The Lexington Times — Lexington posts a map of its license-plate cameras (July 13, 2026)](https://feeds.lexingtonky.news/article/lexington-flock-cameras-what-the-map-doesnt-show) --- This report was drafted with AI assistance (claude-opus-5) and finalized for publication by The Lexington Times. It is grounded in primary records: the Council's published Legistar agenda and legislative history, the Flock Safety master services agreement and order forms filed with LFUCG Contract #094-2024, Lexington Police Department cover memos, the Bluegrass DSA demand letter and petition, LFUCG's published public comment rules, and Urban County Council meeting recordings in the LFUCG Granicus archive. Quotations were checked against the source documents and meeting video.