Waukesha Votes to Discontinue License-Plate Reader Program; Nextdoor Declares Total Victory Over Surveillance State

WAUKESHA — The Common Council voted 7-2 Tuesday night to discontinue the city's contract with Flock Safety, ending an 18-month run of automated license-plate reader cameras at nine intersections, after a Public Safety Committee review found the program cost $94,000 annually and had directly assisted in the resolution of, by the city's own count, three cases.

City Administrator Kevin Lahner said the cameras would be physically removed by December 31, with the seven-figure question of what to do with nine now-useless steel poles tabled until the January budget session. "We're going to look into whether the Parks Department wants them for something," Lahner said. "I don't know what. Bird feeders, maybe."

The vote followed nearly a year of public comment, budget scrutiny and a data-sharing dispute after residents learned Flock's camera network could, in theory, be queried by out-of-state law enforcement agencies. Councilman Gary Puchalski, who voted against renewal, called the arrangement "a subscription service for our own license plates that we were somehow paying for."

The Thread

Within eleven minutes of the vote being reported by WTMJ, a Nextdoor thread in the Downtown Waukesha neighborhood titled "WE WON" had its first comment. By Wednesday morning it had accumulated 847 comments, a moderator pin, and a secondary thread titled "WE WON (cont'd)" after the original hit Nextdoor's comment cap.

The thread's most active poster, Randall Jesske, 56, a retired accountant on Hartwell Avenue, had posted eight separate warnings about the camera program over the preceding eleven months, including one in February titled "THEY ARE WATCHING YOUR BUMPER" that received four replies, all from Jesske responding to himself. On Wednesday, he wrote that the city had "finally listened to the people," a sentence that appeared, with minor variations, six additional times under his account.

"I said it in February and I'll say it again. When you fight, you win. I fought. We won."

— Randall Jesske, Nextdoor, Downtown Waukesha neighborhood

Jesske did not respond to a request for comment sent through Nextdoor's messaging feature. He also did not respond to two follow-up questions posted beneath his own June comment expressing concern about a new Culver's location on Sunset Drive, in which he predicted the drive-through would "back traffic up to the Piggly Wiggly" and asked neighbors to "keep an eye on it and report back." No neighbor reported back. The Culver's opened without incident on July 14 and has a 4.6-star rating.

The Data

The Public Safety Committee's 34-page report, first commissioned after the department's earlier reconsideration of the program in September, found the cameras had recorded approximately 2.1 million vehicle passes since installation, of which 11 were flagged as matches to stolen-vehicle alerts, 4 led to a traffic stop, and 1 resulted in a recovered vehicle, a 2014 Subaru Outback taken from a driveway on Northview Road in March.

Police Chief Dan Baumann told the committee the department valued the system but could not, in good conscience, defend a $94,000 line item that had "functionally worked once." He said officers would return to "traditional methods," which he clarified meant "driving around and looking."

Councilman Puchalski said the deciding factor for several council members was not privacy but the invoice. "I could have been talked into keeping the cameras if they'd found more stolen Subarus," he said. "I could not be talked into $94,000 for one Subaru."

What Comes Down, What Stays Up

Of the nine camera locations, the Council voted to leave the mounting hardware at the East Avenue and Sunset Drive intersections in place through 2027 "for possible future use," a provision that Jesske's thread interpreted as evidence the city was "trying to sneak it back in during the holidays," a claim Lahner called "not accurate, and also not how budget cycles work."

City Engineer Wanda Trebilcock, who has also spent the fall fielding roundabout-navigation claims at the East Avenue traffic circle, said she was relieved the camera decommissioning did not fall under her department. "I have enough intersections," she said.

Bob Krueger, the retired DPW supervisor who occasionally writes for the paper's opinion page, said in an email that he remembered when the only surveillance downtown was "Ned England with a lawn chair and a radar gun, and frankly the clearance rate was comparable." Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, declined to take a position on the vote but said he had "always operated in full view of the public" and considered his methods "more of a neighborhood watch situation."

What's Next

The removal contract goes out for bid this week, with Lahner estimating decommissioning costs at roughly $6,000, a figure Puchalski noted brings the program's true final cost to $100,000 "on the nose, which I almost respect." The Council's next Public Safety Committee meeting, scheduled for October 6, will not include Flock Safety on the agenda for the first time since March 2025.

As of Wednesday evening, the "WE WON" thread had moved on to a debate over whether the city should replace the cameras with "more visible police presence," a proposal Jesske has not yet weighed in on.