Puchalski Proposes 90-Day Purge For License Plate Reader Data After Poll

WAUKESHA — Councilman Gary Puchalski is requesting a full staff report on the city's automatic license plate reader program after learning this week that it has been running since early 2024 under a "provisional" label that nobody ever got around to reviewing.

Puchalski said he started digging after a Wisconsin Right Now poll found 67 percent of respondents statewide wanted limits on how long plate reader data is kept. He pulled up the city's own numbers and found the system had logged roughly 147,000 vehicle scans over the past 18 months, a figure he said he had to ask for twice because the first spreadsheet he received was missing a column.

"I've been on this council four years and I did not know we owned this equipment," Puchalski said. "I knew about the speed cameras on Sunset Drive. I did not know about this."

A quiet rollout

City records obtained by this paper show the plate reader program was approved as a 90-day pilot in February 2024 by a since-departed public works administrator and was never brought back to committee for a permanent vote. The cameras, mounted on four patrol vehicles and two fixed poles along Sunset Drive and Grandview Boulevard, have continued operating on the original provisional authorization for 629 days.

Fellow council member Renata Okafor said she only learned the program existed last Tuesday. "I didn't even know we had this until the privacy poll came out," Okafor said. "I've been representing the Fourth District for six years and I found out about a city surveillance system from a newspaper poll about a different city's surveillance system."

Police Department records supervisor Dale Fencik, who oversees the plate reader database, said the raw scan data is currently kept indefinitely because no retention policy was ever written into the pilot resolution. "Nobody told us to delete anything, so we didn't," Fencik said. "We've got scans going back to the install date. I could tell you what was parked on Grandview on a Tuesday in April of last year if you wanted that for some reason."

The purge protocol

Puchalski's proposal, which he plans to introduce at next month's Public Safety Committee meeting, would require the department to automatically delete any scan data not tied to an active investigation after 90 days. He said he landed on the number after calling three other Wisconsin municipalities and finding retention windows ranging from 30 to 120 days, then picking the one in the middle.

"I'm not trying to take away a tool," Puchalski said. "If a car's plate comes back on a stolen vehicle list, grab it, keep it, build your case. If it's just some guy driving to the Pick 'n Save on Grandview, there's no reason that sits in a server for two years.

"If it's just some guy driving to the Pick 'n Save, there's no reason that sits in a server for two years."

— Gary Puchalski, city councilman

Fencik said the department supports a written policy in principle but flagged one complication: the current software, purchased in 2024 from a vendor whose contract renews in March, does not have a built-in automatic deletion function. Any purge would have to be done manually by a staff member running a monthly export and delete, a task he estimated at "maybe four hours a month, if nothing weird happens."

Council reaction

Council President Marv Teskey said he wants the staff report before committing to a specific retention window but agreed the lack of any formal vote since 2024 was "not how this is supposed to work." He said he plans to ask the city attorney whether the original pilot authorization is even still legally valid after 629 days.

Okafor said she has already started asking constituents in the Fourth District whether they knew the cameras existed. Of the fourteen people she said she'd spoken with as of Thursday, one did, and that resident thought the cameras were for counting traffic volume rather than reading plates.

Puchalski said the staff report is due back to committee by December 9, and that he expects the purge protocol to get a vote before the end of the year regardless of what the report finds. "At minimum, we should know what we have," he said. "Right now I don't think anyone in this building could tell you that with a straight face."