Mendota Heights Mayor & City Council Candidate Forum | September 23, 2026

Our Take

Town Square Television's candidate forum for Mendota Heights mayor and city council isn't a surveillance exposé, but it's worth your attention anyway. Credit to the channel for doing the unglamorous work of putting local candidates on record about "top issues facing the city" — because ALPR contracts, police budget line items, and data-sharing agreements almost never get decided at the state or federal level. They get decided in rooms like this one, by people most residents couldn't name.

That's the real lesson here. Flock Safety doesn't need a national mandate to blanket a community in license plate readers — it just needs a quiet council vote, a line in a public safety budget, or a mayor who treats "crime-fighting technology" as a self-evidently good thing without asking who else gets access to the data. Candidate forums like this one are exactly where voters should be pressing on those questions: Does the city have ALPR cameras now? Who can query the data? Is there any public audit? If a candidate can't answer, that's itself an answer.

We'd encourage Mendota Heights residents to check our camera map to see what's already been deployed nearby, and to use our take-action resources to push your local candidates — whoever they are — for real transparency before the next budget cycle locks in more cameras.