Want to know whether your own town runs plate reader cameras, what its contract costs, and what happens to a photo of your plate? Skip to the box at the bottom.
Vermont towns, cities and state agencies will be barred from using license plate reading cameras starting July 1, 2027, unless lawmakers change the law, the Agency of Transportation says.
The provision is one sentence. Section 1609 of Title 23 says that “no State agency or department or any political subdivision of the State shall use automated license plate recognition systems or automated traffic law enforcement systems.” An automated license plate recognition system, usually shortened to ALPR, is a camera that photographs passing plates and turns them into searchable computer records. An automated traffic law enforcement system is a camera that mails out speeding tickets.
Vermont’s current plate reader rules are repealed and the ban takes their place on July 1, 2027. An earlier date, July 2, 2025, would have applied if the Agency of Transportation had been “unable to secure federal funding” by June 30, 2025 for a pilot program testing speed cameras in highway work zones. The Legislature’s website still lists both dates.
The Agency of Transportation told Compass the funding was approved, so the later date governs.
“Federal funds through the Highway Safety Program had been approved for use on a pilot program as authorized by Act 135,” said Patrick Murphy, the agency’s State Policy Director. About $1 million was estimated for the program before the June 2025 deadline, he said, though the agency said it is unclear whether an exact amount was ever obligated. There is no precise figure.
“The Agency’s position is that the law has therefore not been repealed but will be repealed in 2027, absent any additional legislative action otherwise,” Patrick Murphy said.
The work zone pilot itself never happened, and never had to for the 2027 date to hold. “Logistical, staffing, and long-term financial challenges have made it difficult for the Agency, in concert with the Department of Public Safety, to establish an operational pilot within the framework outlined by the Legislature,” Patrick Murphy said. The federal money has since gone to other projects, and no speed camera has ever operated in a Vermont work zone. Compass reported a year ago that the work zone pilot was stalled and that other states had solved the same problems.
What the rules are until then
Until July 2027, Vermont’s current plate reader rules still apply. Under Section 1607, the law requires that:
Cameras be operated by officers holding plate reader certification from the Vermont Criminal Justice Council.
Local police have access to the most recent week of camera data, with older records held by the Department of Public Safety.
Requests for records less than six months old be in writing and show specific facts and reasonable grounds.
Records older than six months be released only on a warrant or a court order in a pending criminal case.
Records be destroyed after 18 months, unless held longer under a preservation request, a disclosure order or a warrant.
The data stay out of private lawsuits. It cannot be subpoenaed in a divorce or an insurance fight.
Those are the requirements the law sets. Whether any particular record was transferred or destroyed on schedule is a separate question, and one the statute alone cannot answer.
Section 1607 governs Vermont law enforcement, and Section 1609’s prohibition reaches state agencies and political subdivisions. Neither section restricts a business or a property owner who puts up a camera for their own purposes. The prohibition follows who is using the system, not who owns it, so a town that buys a private company’s cameras is still a town using them.
What the state’s own cameras did
Vermont’s regulated plate reader program had nearly disappeared before Flock arrived. The Department of Public Safety’s 2021 annual report counted one mobile unit in the entire state, operated by the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. It submitted 2,959 plate readings that year, about eight a day, and generated 16 alerts. None of the 16 led to an enforcement action. The report lists no requests for stored readings from any agency in or out of Vermont. The year cost $7,700, all of it State Police spending to run the server.
The report is not internally consistent. Its main text says the Department of Motor Vehicles no longer uses plate readers and sent no data to the state database, while a footnote says DMV “did report three alerts which resulted commercial motor vehicle enforcement.” The report does not reconcile the two.
Section 1607 requires that report every January 15, and the amended reporting provision took effect July 1, 2025. The 2021 report is the most recent one Compass could locate on the Legislature’s website.
Manchester, the one Vermont town that bought in
Manchester installed five Flock Safety cameras in 2023, stopped using the system in 2025 when the current rules took effect, and is using it again now. The town pays $15,000 for the current contract year, which runs through March 2027, or about $41 a day, the Bennington Banner reported in August.
The 2025 stoppage came down to a practical problem. The law tells towns to hand older camera records to the state, and Town Manager Scott Murphy told the Banner then that the state “didn’t set up any method to take it in.” He said the town was not using the system until the question was cleared up.
Manchester later asked the state where it stood and was told its use complied with the law, because of how the information was stored and because the hardware in Manchester was not the use the law was written to address, VTDigger reported in June from emails it obtained. The same reporting, which describes the town’s officers as having paused their searches, found that data from Manchester’s cameras was included in searches run by law enforcement agencies around the country until March, when the town changed its settings to end that.
The selectboard took up the cameras’ future on Aug. 18 and tabled it. Members plan to visit the police station to see the technology and look at less invasive options, with any decision left to fall budget season.
Police there describe the cameras as an investigative tool. “My focus is less on the company itself and more on how we use the technology here in Manchester,” Police Chief James Blanchard told the Banner. Scott Murphy, the town manager, put the case for keeping them bluntly: “We don’t want to turn into a Brown University shooting. That is how that person was caught.”
Selectboard member Jonathan West said the product has changed since the town signed on. “What began as a very straightforward license plate reading tool has evolved into a much larger, cloud-based network,” he said.
The unresolved question of out-of-state searches
Vermont police reach plate data the state does not collect. VTDigger reported in June that Vermont departments search Flock’s national network of more than 80,000 cameras through NESPIN, the New England State Police Information Network, a police information-sharing nonprofit, and that Vermont officers ran more than 100 such searches over three years.
Whether the 2027 ban reaches that practice is an open question. Section 1609 bars state agencies and towns from using plate reader systems, and says nothing one way or the other about systems that sit outside Vermont. Nothing in the record settles whether searching another state’s cameras counts as using a system under the ban.
Police say the access matters. Berlin Police Chief James Pontbriand called it “a very important tool to law enforcement” that “might open up doors to us that we would never have been able to get to ourselves.” Hartford Police Chief Connie Kelley said her department turns to it for “significant crimes,” adding, “you save one child, that’s enough for us.”
Others see the reach itself as the problem. “I don’t think we should have to expect that we are tracked in every single one of our movements along public roadways,” ACLU of Vermont advocacy director Falko Schilling told VTDigger. Rep. Barbara Rachelson, who helped write Vermont’s first plate reader law in 2013, said the out-of-state searching is “concerning on so many fronts that I would want to see legislation to be explicit about these situations.”
The national fight
Flock Safety, the Atlanta company that made the cameras Manchester bought, has become the subject of town meeting fights across the country. It has also started losing customers. NPR reported in February that at least 30 American localities had deactivated cameras or canceled Flock contracts since the start of 2025, many after learning that federal immigration agents had searched their local camera data. Flock says each customer controls who can see its data.
Those fights are playing out town by town, in places where the decision belongs to the select board or the city council. In Vermont, the Legislature has already made it, and the date is on the calendar.
Four tries, no change
Moving the 2027 date takes an act of the Legislature, and four attempts have come and gone.
H.500, from Rachelson, would have blocked the repeal and kept the current rules. It drew one committee hearing in April 2025 and went no further.
S.35 would have deleted the repeal and the ban outright and made work zone speed cameras permanent. One hearing in May 2025, then nothing.
S.263, from Sens. Andrew Perchlik and Thomas Chittenden, would have pushed the repeal to 2029 and let a town use traffic cameras for speeding, red lights and excessive vehicle noise if voters approved at town meeting, with the power to rescind that approval by petition and a later vote. Introduced in January 2026, it got a Senate Transportation hearing on Feb. 26 and stayed there.
Draft language prepared for House Transportation on April 22, 2026, by Legislative Counsel Damien Leonard, would have pushed the sunset to 2029 during work on S.326, the annual motor vehicle bill. S.326 became Act 153 on June 16. The extension is not in it.
Lawmakers return in January with about six months before the ban takes effect. Vermont Public reported last December that Burlington was weighing plate readers of its own, and raised the question of what Section 1609 would mean for a city that bought them. The agency that would have run the pilot has now given its answer on the date: the clock runs out July 1, 2027.
Check your own town
Does your town run plate reader cameras?
Search your select board or city council minutes for “Flock,” “license plate” or “ALPR.” Most Vermont towns post minutes on their municipal website, and camera contracts generally surface in budget discussions.
Ask your police department, in a public records request, for any plate reader contract, its annual cost and term, the department’s operating policy, and any data-sharing agreements, including whether the department can search camera networks outside Vermont such as NESPIN. Ask that last question even if your town owns no cameras, because access does not require owning one.
Read the state’s own accounting. Section 1607 requires the Department of Public Safety to report to four legislative committees every January 15 on camera counts, readings, alerts, investigations aided and costs. The most recent one Compass could locate covers 2021.
What if a camera photographed your plate? If it was a camera a Vermont police department uses, the law puts older records with the Department of Public Safety, requires a warrant or court order for anything more than six months old, and calls for destruction after 18 months unless a preservation request, disclosure order or warrant extends it. A camera a business or property owner runs for their own purposes is outside those police rules, and the 2027 ban, which applies to government use, will not change that.