Macon County Didn’t Cancel Its Contract. It Stopped Paying.

On the night of July 15, in a county seat five hours west of Wilmington, five commissioners did the thing New Hanover residents keep being told their board cannot do.

They stopped paying for Flock.

Following a discussion with Sheriff Brent Holbrooks, Macon County commissioners voted 5–0 on July 15, 2026 to discontinue the $47,000 in taxpayer money funding Flock Safety cameras. Commissioner John Shearl moved to “de-Flock Macon County” by opting out of the contract at renewal — a non-renewal, not a mid-term budget cut — then made a second motion to remove the cameras, because the renewal vote alone did not mandate their removal. Both passed unanimously.

Be precise about what that means, because it is not everything. WLOS reports that twelve county-owned cameras come down — immediately, though the contract runs to October — while four cameras on school property stay, and privately owned Flock cameras in the county are untouched. A board that wanted a gesture would have waited for October. This board is paying to end it early, and it carved out the schools. Both of those are decisions.

Read the first motion again, because the mechanism is the whole story. They did not cancel a contract. They declined to fund one.

The word that matters is “expenditure”

Every conversation about removing Flock from New Hanover County runs into the same wall. The contract — #25-0364, $219,000 over 24 months — belongs to the Sheriff’s Office. So the answer residents get, in one form or another, is that this is the Sheriff’s program. Not the board’s call. Take it up with him.

Macon County just showed the flaw in that answer.

A North Carolina sheriff is separately elected. He runs his office, and a board of commissioners does not run it for him. That is real, and we are not going to pretend otherwise to make a point. But a sheriff spends money the county appropriates, and the board writes the budget. A board that declines to appropriate $47,000 for camera subscriptions has not told a sheriff how to do his job. It has told him what the county will buy.

That is an ordinary act of budgeting. It is close to the least exotic thing a county commission does all year.

The Sheriff defended it. The vote was still 5–0.

On July 6 — nine days before the vote — the Macon County Sheriff’s Office put out a statement. It said public discussion had grown divided. It said it was important to separate verified facts from misinformation. It said the cameras capture plates and vehicle characteristics but not names or driver’s license information, that data is deleted after 30 days, that only sworn officers with authorized access may use the system, and that the office remains committed to using technology responsibly while respecting privacy.

Those are, almost line for line, the assurances New Hanover residents have been given.

Nine days later, his commissioners voted 5–0.

We want to be precise about what that does and doesn’t mean, because the easy version is the wrong one. The point is not that the Sheriff was dishonest. We have no basis to say that, and we don’t say it. The point is narrower and more useful than that: the assurances were never the question. A board can accept every representation a sheriff makes about how carefully a system is run and still conclude the county has no business buying it. Those are two different questions, and only one of them is a budget question. Macon’s board answered the budget question.

This stopped being a Triangle story

The three North Carolina communities that ended Flock before this — Hillsborough, Pittsboro, and Chatham County — sit within about twenty miles of one another in the Orange–Chatham corridor. That handed anyone who wanted to wave it off an easy line: a college-town thing, a Triangle thing. Not us.

Macon County sits in the far western mountains, on the Georgia line, a five-hour drive from Chatham. It is not a college town. Its commissioners voted unanimously.

Four North Carolina communities now, east to west, by town board and county board alike. Whatever is happening here, it is not regional and it is not partisan.

Macon walked away from $47,000. We pay $219,000.

New Hanover County pays $119,000 in year one and $100,000 a year after — $219,000 across the 24-month term — for a Flock system the Sheriff now counts at 36 cameras: 28 plate readers + 8 Condor live-video cameras. That is roughly 4.7 times what Macon County just decided wasn’t worth it.

We don’t yet know whether Macon’s $47,000 is an annual figure or the full contract, because the minutes aren’t posted. When they are, we’ll say which it was, plainly, even if it narrows the gap. But on either reading, this county is spending a multiple of what a board just declined to spend — on a network that has run 2,980,082 searches in about sixteen months with every searching agency and officer name redacted, and that not one of our five commissioners has publicly defended. Or publicly supported.

Two motions, and the one that does the work

Macon’s board passed two motions. The first cut the money. The second directed that the cameras come down.

The second is the more interesting one, and we’ll be straight that we can’t tell you how it resolves. A North Carolina sheriff is a separately elected officer with operational control of his own office. How far a board of commissioners can go in directing what he takes down — as opposed to what it agrees to pay for — is a genuine question, and a blog post is not where it gets answered.

Here’s why that hardly matters: it doesn’t need to be answered. The first motion is the one that does the work. A subscription nobody funds ends when the term ends. No litigation. No standoff. No test of anyone’s authority. The board simply stops buying it, and the cameras become somebody else’s problem to justify.

That is the roadmap. It is boring, and the boring part is the point.

The same question, asked here

New Hanover’s five commissioners have taken no public position on Flock. We wrote to all five. None has responded. They meet regularly — see upcoming meetings.

They will not be asked to cancel a contract, direct a sheriff, or resolve a constitutional question. They’ll be asked the question Macon County’s board answered in a single evening: is this worth $219,000 of your neighbors’ money?

2,276 of those neighbors — 59% of every signer who gave a usable zip — live in New Hanover County. 2,870, or 74%, live in the three Cape Fear counties these cameras cover. Not one of them was asked before the cameras went up.

Macon County’s commissioners took about one evening. Ours have had since March.

The full account is in, and it sharpens every point above

The Smoky Mountain News has now published a 2,000-word account by a reporter who was in the room, and it settles the details. More than 100 people filled the July 15 meeting. Chair Josh Young and Commissioner Barry Breeden were the swing votes, and both cited the volume of constituent contact; Commissioner John Shearl, who drove the effort with weeks of public argument beforehand, made both motions. Lt. Lee Tritt defended the program, calling the cameras “almost like having an extra deputy.” And Sheriff Holbrooks testified the county’s cameras log between 1 million and 3 million plates a month — in a county of about 37,000 people.

One exchange is worth holding onto, because it is testable. A Flock representative, Alex Guth, told the commissioners that all data is purged 30 days after recording and that “all data is in the custody of the law enforcement organization with the Flock contract.” Set that against records we already hold from other North Carolina agencies on the same platform. NC A&T’s Network Audit logs 1,390,776 searches by 3,487 outside organizations in three months; Kure Beach’s shows direct shares to the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Whatever “custody” is meant to convey, a network searchable by thousands of outside agencies is not data that stays in one sheriff’s hands. That gap — between the company’s assurance to a governing board and the agencies’ own audits — is exactly the thing a board should press before it signs.