NCDOT Has Its Own Flock Deal — and the Sheriff’s Readers Sit in State Right-of-Way

On July 4 we filed a records request with the North Carolina Department of Transportation — not the usual privacy questions, but a compliance-and-safety one: which surveillance cameras sit in the state’s own right-of-way, who permitted them, and were the poles built to crash-safety standards? We escalated on August 8 believing the request had gone unanswered. It had not. Our escalation crossed with a July 30 production from NCDOT records analyst Amira Ishak that we had simply not seen. We correct that publicly — and the records are worth it.

The Sheriff’s plate readers are in state right-of-way — with permits

NCDOT has issued five encroachments for automated license plate readers in New Hanover County right-of-way. Four went to the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, approved July 7, September 12, October 6, and December 29, 2025. A fifth went to the State Highway Patrol on March 17, 2026. NCDOT states plainly that no homeowners association and no municipality holds an LPR encroachment in the county.

The contrast is the point. In Pender County, the Sheriff’s cameras sit on private land a few feet off the state right-of-way — the siting that avoids an encroachment permit. In New Hanover, the Sheriff took the other route: into the right-of-way, with NCDOT’s permits. Both are now on the record.

NCDOT signed its own MOU with Flock

The larger disclosure is about the live-video cameras. NCDOT distinguishes Flock’s “Condor” live-view cameras from plate readers — and revealed that the Department itself holds a signed data-sharing MOU with Flock Safety. It was executed on March 31, 2026 by Dom Ciaramitaro, NCDOT’s State Traffic Systems Operations Engineer, and Flock’s chief legal officer. Under it, NCDOT may view live video from Flock’s camera network for “traffic monitoring, traffic operations, and emergency management” — and, under Section 4, may be granted access to the Flock video of law-enforcement agencies across North Carolina whenever those agencies elect to share it. A state transportation department is wired into the Flock network.

How is that even allowed? Start with a distinction the records force: this is about data, not poles. NCDOT routinely permits the physical installation of cameras in its right-of-way — that is exactly what the five Falcon encroachments are, and issuing them says nothing about who may use what the cameras capture. What the ALPR statute controls is who may access the plate data. § 20-183.31(b) limits that to law-enforcement purposes only — and NCDOT is not a law-enforcement agency, nor is “traffic monitoring” a law-enforcement purpose. The Department could not lawfully tap a Falcon’s plate reads for traffic work. The Condor is how it gets in anyway. North Carolina defines an ALPR narrowly, as a system that converts images of license plates into computer-readable data (§ 20-183.30). A Condor is a live-video camera; it converts nothing. So its feed sits outside the ALPR law entirely — and, with it, outside the law-enforcement-only limit. That is the loophole. The access the statute forbids for plate data — a non-law-enforcement agency, for a non-law-enforcement purpose — is quietly permitted for the live video coming off the same pole.

The Condor cameras have no encroachments — and NCDOT flagged it

Here is the part that answers what we filed on. NCDOT told us it asked Flock Safety to submit encroachment agreements for the live-view cameras — and, to date, Flock has not done so in New Hanover County, separate from the MOU. NCDOT then named the consequence itself: if Flock has deployed devices within the right-of-way without approval, it “may be in violation of GS 136-18(10),” the statute that lets the Department require an encroachment. In plain terms — the live-video cameras may be standing in the public right-of-way without the permit the law requires, and the road authority has said so in writing.

Consider a concrete example. One of the county’s Condors stands on Castle Hayne Road (NC 133) — a state-maintained route, and squarely NCDOT-encroachment territory. None of the five encroachments NCDOT issued is a Condor; all five are Falcon plate readers. So the question is whether that pole sits within the NC 133 right-of-way — measured, as right-of-way is, from the centerline, not the edge of pavement. Two facts now bear on it. A field measurement puts the pole about 42 feet from the centerline. And NCDOT’s own corridor plans for this stretch — project U-5863, which widens NC 133 through the Oakley Road area with a center turn lane, bike lanes, and curb-and-gutter — show a proposed 100-foot right-of-way, roughly 50 feet on each side of the centerline. At 42 feet, the pole would sit inside that right-of-way by several feet — in the graded utility strip behind the curb, exactly where an encroachment agreement is required. We are not yet asserting a violation: those plans are marked preliminary, and the recorded right-of-way for the built section is what finally settles it — a figure we have asked NCDOT Division 3 to confirm. But the measurement now points toward encroachment territory, not away from it — for Haven Place, and for the rest of the eight. But it is precisely the question the Department’s own answer invites — for Haven Place, and for the rest of the eight.

The Sheriff is in the SBI’s statewide pilot

NCDOT also produced a State Bureau of Investigation email dated March 4, 2025 confirming the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office was accepted into the statewide ALPR pilot established by S.L. 2023-151. No other New Hanover County agency was. The same roster names 28 participating agencies statewide — among them the Brunswick, Columbus, and Macon county sheriffs, UNC Charlotte police, Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD, and the State Highway Patrol.

And the poles — the completed file (Aug 19)

On August 19, 2026, NCDOT completed the production by secure transfer. The engineering file for encroachment E033-065-25-00128 shows how these went in: the Sheriff first applied for seven breakaway-pole plate readers, but one site — in a controlled-access area tied to the Gordon Road (U-6202) widening corridor — conflicted with an active construction project and was removed, leaving six. The approved package carries a MASH breakaway-pole structural analysis and added traffic-restriction provisions; it was signed off on September 12, 2025.

Three findings stand out from the completed record:

• A denied — then deleted — encroachment. A separate Sheriff’s application, E033-065-25-00561, for a reader on Gordon Road (SR 2048), was automatically denied on February 9, 2026 after Flock Safety went unresponsive to NCDOT’s requested changes. The permits portal then auto-deleted those records 180 days later — the county’s own denial history, erased on a timer.
• Only the Sheriff may put readers in the right-of-way. NCDOT’s State Encroachments Engineer wrote that in New Hanover County, only the Sheriff’s Office ALPRs are allowed in the right-of-way — and that any belonging to the Town of Wrightsville Beach (which had asked to place two on existing poles) “should be denied.”
• No one inspected the poles after they went up. NCDOT confirmed no post-installation field inspections were performed, and that it holds no documented clear-zone setback analysis beyond a plan-review “check” — for surveillance poles placed along high-traffic state roads.

The Condor live-video cameras still have no encroachment: Flock has not submitted the agreements NCDOT asked for, and the possible GS 136-18(10) violation the Department named itself remains open.

From the file: read the records yourself

The full production is on the Internet Archive, unaltered. A few documents worth opening:

• “Any belonging to the Town of Wrightsville Beach should be denied.” — NCDOT’s State Encroachments Engineer, on the record that only the Sheriff’s readers may sit in New Hanover right-of-way.
• The Sheriff’s desired pole locations — the email listing all seven proposed reader sites by GPS coordinate, and the road-construction conflicts that forced one to be dropped.
• The NCDOT plan sheets for two of the sites: S. 17th Street (Greenlawn) and S. College Road (NC 132).
• The crash-safety engineering for the poles now standing in the right-of-way: the signed breakaway-pole approval, the pole drawings, and the 114-page MASH crash report.

Update — August 25, 2026: the remaining files arrived, and they answer two of our open questions

NCDOT sent the balance of the production by secure file transfer. Three things in it matter.

First, a camera location the Sheriff’s Office redacts is written plainly in NCDOT’s files. Encroachment Agreement EA161A authorizes “1 solar-powered ALPR camera on a MASH-tested, NCDOT-approved pole” at “P#030 Gordon Rd @ Ogden Park Dr” on SR-2048 in New Hanover County. An internal NCDOT review email from August 12, 2025 shows a Division 3 engineer checking that same reader against a road-construction project (U-6202) on Gordon Road, to keep it “outside of the project limits.” The Sheriff blacks out where his cameras are; the road authority’s permit file names the corner.

Second, the SBI–Sheriff pilot MOU we said NCDOT did not hold has now surfaced — and it mandates data-sharing. The February 2025 Memorandum of Understanding between the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office and the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation governs ALPRs placed on NCDOT right-of-way under the statewide pilot (S.L. 2023-151 § 5, as amended by S.L. 2024-43). Its terms are not passive: the Sheriff’s Office “agrees to take all steps necessary to share their ALPR data with NCSBI and other agencies participating in the Pilot Program.” Enrolling a reader in the state pilot is not just a permit to plant a pole — it is an agreement to feed the plate data into a statewide network.

Third, the pilot’s roster is a moving target, and one local reader already lapsed. A June 2025 exchange shows the SBI maintaining a controlled list of “authorized” law-enforcement agencies — with agencies dropping out and being replaced — which NCDOT checks before it grants an encroachment. And on February 19, 2026, NCDOT’s State Encroachments Engineer wrote that, “due to a lack of response after 6 months, the system deleted the subject License Tag Reader encroachment” — one New Hanover reader whose permit simply expired for want of follow-through. (These supplemental records are mirrored at the Internet Archive; we redacted one sheriff’s-office officer’s direct email and phone from the MOU, consistent with our practice.)

What happens next

We credit NCDOT for a cooperative, substantive production, now complete. The open questions we’re still pursuing: a direct answer, location by location, on whether each Condor pole sits inside the recorded right-of-way; and the retained records behind the deleted Gordon Road reader. Every record NCDOT produced goes to the Internet Archive, unaltered. The compliance question we filed on July 4 now has a factual spine: plate readers permitted in the right-of-way, live-video cameras that may not be, and a state DOT holding its own key to the Flock network.

Related

• The Flock contract’s eight Condor cameras — the live-video product.
• The Condors we’ve located, on the map.
• Pender’s off-right-of-way siting — the private-land route.
• Where every agency’s records request stands.