The pole and the paper

A guardrail, a daughter, and a post

Steve Eimers is from rural East Tennessee. In November 2016 his seventeen-year-old daughter Hannah was killed on Interstate 75 when an X-Lite guardrail end terminal failed to absorb her vehicle and speared it instead.

What he did after that is the reason his name carries weight. He taught himself roadside engineering, started filming, and kept filming. X-Lite terminals are now banned in every American state and every Canadian province. State and provincial transportation departments have spent on the order of a hundred million dollars pulling them out of the ground. He built an audience of roughly a quarter million people across YouTube, TikTok and X doing it.

In April 2024 he turned that same lens on automated license plate readers. Not over privacy. Over the pole.

He came to our Commission meeting and made a point I had not made and had not thought to make. I have spent weeks on the contract. I had not looked at the hardware.

Why a sign post is built to fall down

Stand next to any speed limit sign on a state route and look at the base. It is designed to shear off, at a known force, and drop forward and away from a vehicle that hits it. That is not decoration. It is a crash-tested system, and the standard it is tested against is the AASHTO Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware — MASH, in the trade.

The zone beside a travel lane where a vehicle leaving the road is likely to end up is called the clear zone. The rule inside it is simple: anything a car might hit should either not be there, or should be engineered to give way.

Eimers has been documenting camera poles that do neither. Mounted directly in concrete. Set closer to the pavement than a comparable sign support would be permitted. Placed hard against guardrail. He has said publicly that he is finding improper installation at a rate approaching one hundred percent, and that nobody is doing third-party testing to verify these poles are crash-safe.

Two things about his position matter, and both cut against the way this argument usually goes.

First, it is not a Flock problem. He names Axon, Motorola, Genetec, Blue Line Solutions and RedFlex in the same breath, and he has documented multiple vendors' hardware installed within a few hundred feet of each other in Knoxville, all of it on posts he considers non-crashworthy.

Second, he is not against license plate readers. He has handed public camera footage to law enforcement himself. Video he archived was used in a charging affidavit in a triple homicide case in Chattanooga. His objection is narrow, technical, and hard to argue with: do not make the road safer with a device that kills somebody when a car slides off it.

I am not going to dress that up into something it isn't. But I will say what follows from it for this county.

Tennessee already has the lever

Here is what I did not know a month ago, and what I suspect most of the Commission does not know either.

A license plate reader on state highway right-of-way in Tennessee is there under a license. Not a purchase. Not a permit in the ordinary sense. A revocable license, issued by the Excess Land Office of TDOT's Right-of-Way Division — the same office that handles surplus state property and airspace leases.

The authority is Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-8-198(f), which says TDOT may permit law enforcement surveillance cameras on state right-of-way. May. Not shall. The department has written its own application form around that discretion, and three things in that form deserve this county's attention.

• Application, Step 1 The local legislative body votes first Where a local law enforcement agency applies, or a local government applies on its behalf, the proposal must go to the city council or county commission before the application is filed — and documentation of that body's approval must be attached. Not a courtesy briefing. A prerequisite.
• Application, opening paragraphs TDOT reserves the right to revoke In the department's own words, on its own form. Approval is tied to a specific brand, make, model and location; move a camera or swap the equipment and a new application is required.
• Application, Section 6 Nothing about crashworthiness The form asks for latitude and longitude, distance from the edge of pavement, an installation plan, and how the thing gets power. It does not ask for MASH certification, a breakaway or slip base, or any third-party crash test result. That is the gap, and TDOT could close it by policy tomorrow.

So there is a question with a documentary answer, and I intend to get it: has any ALPR license been issued for state right-of-way in Loudon County, and if so, what local approval was attached to the application?

I am writing to the Manager of the TDOT Excess Land Office to request every application, license agreement, Excess Land Committee recommendation, and piece of local-approval documentation on file for this county — including anything submitted by or for the Sheriff's Office, Lenoir City, Loudon, Greenback or Philadelphia. When it comes back, it goes on the agenda and it goes on the county website. If the answer is that everything was properly voted, that is a fine answer and I will publish it as readily as any other.

Florida already pulled theirs

On August 31, 2026, in Engineering and Operations Memorandum No. 26-01, the Florida Department of Transportation revoked every license plate reader approval it had issued to local law enforcement for placement within the rights-of-way of the State Highway System. Agencies got thirty days to take the equipment down; whatever remains after that, FDOT removes itself.

The stated reasons were the sharp increase in deployments along Florida roadways together with reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes. The department's chief operating officer grounded the action in Fla. Stat. § 316.0777, which gives FDOT broad authority to approve or deny placement in state right-of-way and to remove at the department's discretion.

Read that statute next to Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-8-198(f) and you are looking at materially the same grant of discretionary authority. A state DOT with permissive power to allow these installations has the same power to stop allowing them. Florida's transportation department exercised it. Tennessee's has not been asked.

I am asking.

Sections 1307 and 1308

The federal half of this is already drafted and sitting in Congress.

H.R. 8870, the BUILD America 250 Act, is the bipartisan five-year surface transportation reauthorization from House Transportation and Infrastructure — roughly $580 billion across FY2027 through FY2031, written to replace the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The committee approved it in May.

Two sections in it go directly at this problem. Section 1307 would bar the Secretary from issuing a Federal-aid reimbursement eligibility letter for roadside safety hardware that fails the crash test criteria in MASH, Second Edition, and would direct a rulemaking to update testing standards. Section 1308 would put the Department of Transportation's Inspector General onto an audit of how the Federal Highway Administration oversees roadside safety hardware, including whether states are actually complying with current MASH standards.

That is a federal judgment, already written down, that hardware placed beside a public road has to be demonstrably crashworthy. It is the same principle Eimers is asking a state DOT to apply to camera poles.

Loudon County's congressman sits on the committee that wrote it. The existing highway authorization runs out September 30. That is a short letter with a real deadline on it, and it is the rare ask where the county is not taking a side in anything — it is backing a grieving father's engineering point.

The resolution in front of us

Separately, a group of residents — GTFOH Loudon County — submitted a draft resolution for a countywide prohibition on surveillance technology. I want to be careful here, because I think they did the county a service by bringing it forward and I would rather improve it than pick at it.

The whereas clauses are largely sound. The patent point is real and well made. The instinct behind it — that this decision belongs to the public body and not to a procurement office — is correct.

But there are four things in it that would either sink it in committee or make it unenforceable if adopted, and I would rather say so now than watch it fail.

• The definition sweeps in the county's own buildings. As drafted it covers any system capable of recording data about the location, movement or identity of members of the public, including networked audio and video sensors — and then orders all existing systems disclosed and discontinued. Read literally, that turns off courthouse security cameras, jail video, the 911 dispatch location system and livescan fingerprinting. The carve-outs for body cameras and for Crime Tracer and TITAN do not reach any of those. This is the first thing an opponent finds.
• There is no exception for a missing child. The only exception to the ban on querying an outside network is a warrant issued on probable cause in a specific criminal investigation. A missing elderly resident or a missing child generates no probable cause of a crime, because there is no crime. As written, a deputy could not check a neighboring agency's system to find them. The state statute itself names searches for missing or endangered persons as a legitimate purpose. That hole needs closing before the first person asks about it in open session.
• It commands an office this Commission does not command. The Sheriff of Loudon County is elected by the same voters who elected me, and he does not report to us. A resolution telling his deputies which databases they may query is on ground the county attorney is unlikely to defend. That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to use the powers we actually hold.
• The inventory comes after the order to shut things off. Section 5 orders existing systems discontinued. Section 6 orders the inventory that would tell us what exists. Those are in the wrong order, and they are two overlapping reports where one would do.

What I am proposing instead

I have redrafted it twice now. The first pass fixed the definition and the missing-child exception. Going back through it a second time turned up a defect in my own draft worth admitting to: Sections 6 and 7 directed the County Mayor and the Road Superintendent, and Section 9 called every fee office a "department" that answers to this Commission. Those officials are elected by the same voters who elected me. That is the identical overreach I flagged in the submitted resolution, just aimed at different offices. Fixed now — the line below is the corrected one.

This Commission cannot tell the Sheriff, the Mayor, the Road Superintendent, the Assessor, or the Board of Education how to run their offices. It can decide what the county buys, what the county signs, what the county accepts as a gift, what stands on county property and county roads, what applications go to Nashville with this body's approval stamped on them, and what its own committees require before a vote. A surveillance program with no appropriation, no executed contract, no county right-of-way permit and no local legislative approval does not exist, whatever anyone's policy manual says.

1. A narrowed definition, and schools stay narrowed tooCovers systems that indiscriminately collect identifying data on the general public — explicitly including student communications monitoring, biometrics, and audio analytics. Expressly excludes facility and jail security video, E-911, booking identification, records databases, traffic counters, and body cameras without live biometric capability. The school exclusion covers physical security cameras only — not the monitoring software running on student devices, which stays inside the resolution.
2. No appropriation, no capital funds, no debtNo county money — general fund, capital, grant, forfeiture, donated, pass-through, or county-issued debt — for testing, piloting, leasing, buying, hosting, maintaining or operating it, in any county facility including schools.
3. No contract, no renewalNo officer or employee executes, renews, extends or exercises a renewal option on the County's behalf. No county funds are available to satisfy anything signed anyway without a recorded vote.
4. No free trials, no donations, no grants without a voteDemonstration units, complimentary pilots, and grant awards all require a recorded vote before the county accepts them — accepting the award is itself the vote, not just applying for it. This is how these programs usually arrive without one.
5. Purchases aggregate; they do not get splitEvery buy from the same vendor in a rolling twelve months counts as one acquisition against the approval threshold. No phasing a program into pieces that each land just under the number that would have brought it to this floor.
6. The state right-of-way approval doesn't exist until this body votes on itNo officer may represent to TDOT or any agency that this Commission has approved a specific ALPR application absent a recorded vote naming the equipment and the locations.
7. County roads: crashworthy or nothingThird-party hardware in a county road right-of-way requires MASH certification of the pole, base and foundation — or documentation it sits outside the clear zone — plus exact coordinates, insurance naming the county, and removal at the owner's expense on revocation.
8. County resources buy no outside accessNo county funds, staff time, equipment or network for standing subscriptions to somebody else's surveillance network. Carve-outs for a warrant, exigent danger, a missing or endangered person, footage handed over voluntarily, and information another agency sends on its own initiative.
9. No surveillance as a subdivision conditionThe County cannot require or accept, as a condition of rezoning or plat approval, developer-installed cameras that feed to a government agency. Private cameras on private property, run for the property's own protection, are untouched.
10. A public hearing before this Commission ever says yesAny future approval requires a noticed public hearing on that specific proposal, at least fourteen days out, with the full written submission posted first.
11. Annual inventory, not a one-time snapshotEvery county office reports what it has — vendor, cost, locations, retention, who else can query it — every year with the budget, including solid waste center cameras and any assessor imagery contract with automated change detection. The Commission votes item by item on what to do with each, then it's published.
12. Vendor conduct on the recordAny gift, meal, trip, or demo unit a vendor offers a commissioner or county employee gets disclosed in writing within thirty days, whether or not it's accepted. Same for any lobbying contact. Published.
13. If this Commission ever says yesThe seven terms I published in September, corrected: no good-faith disclosure clause, no perpetual data license, affirmative renewal only, logged queries, fourteen-day retention with an exception for data under an active investigation or a litigation hold, mutual indemnification plus cyber liability coverage, and an annual public report. A floor, not an endorsement.

Part B asks the Sheriff for the same inventory and a written query policy. It asks the Board of Education to disclose what monitoring software runs in the schools, and to tell parents what categories of student activity it watches. It asks the Assessor to disclose any change-detection aerial imagery contract. It asks TDOT to review every outstanding ALPR license in this county and condition future ones on MASH crashworthiness, as Florida has done. It asks the General Assembly for statewide standards, and our congressional delegation to carry Sections 1307 and 1308.

I would rather ask a fellow elected official plainly and be told no than issue an order I cannot enforce and pretend it worked.

The part I'd ask you to read even if you skip the rest

Everything above this line is a restriction. That's a hard vote for anyone who ran on public safety, and it gives the Sheriff nothing. So the draft also includes a procurement standard — not a ban, a process. Any future request for public safety technology goes to the Budget Committee on a standard form: the problem it solves, what data it collects and from whom, five-year total cost, what was considered instead, published evidence it works, who gets access, and how the Commission will know later whether it was worth it. Then it gets a public hearing.

And the Sheriff gets a standing invitation, on his own schedule, to bring the Commission an assessment of what his office actually needs — heard in open session, weighed in the regular budget cycle like any other department's request, with the Commission required to say why in public if it says no to any part of it.

That's the section that turns this from a fight into a negotiation. The question stops being whether the Sheriff gets to have technology. It becomes how the county buys it — on a record, against a cost, with a way to check later whether it worked.

What this does not do

It does not touch the courthouse cameras, the jail's physical security systems, hallway cameras at the schools, or 911 dispatch. It does not stop a deputy from working a stolen vehicle, a missing child, or an Amber Alert. It does not stop anyone from handing law enforcement their own security footage. It does not ban a private business or a homeowner from running a camera on their own property.

It does not accuse the Sheriff's Office, the Mayor's office, or any other county official of anything. Nothing in this county has been shown to be improper, and I have said from the start that I am not hostile to the Sheriff's Office — I worked in it for thirteen years.

What it does is make sure that a decision this consequential arrives at this Commission, on a written record and in public, before it arrives at a pole or a classroom — and that when the county does say yes to something, everyone can see what it cost and whether it worked.

Status

The Word file is there so anyone — commissioner, resident, or the county attorney — can redline it and send it back.