Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 12-04-25_THURSDAY_7AM

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Some open phones to start, then there seems to be growing pushback on License Plate Readers. Charlie Degliomini is Executive Vice President of A.I. Roadway Technology company Rekor Systems and talks about how their system encrypts the data for privacy.

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Klauser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausordrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. We're going to be talking about economics a bit here. Dr. Fruits, Dr. Eric Fruits, joins me. And he submitted a piece over at Taxpayers Association of Oregon Foundation. And I think it was on Oregon Catalyst, a bunch of other business pages here, too.

And we also have Governor Kotech who is talking about, I guess we're going to, Revive the economy, and Dr. Fruits, Tina Kotech has a plan, right? Isn't that the story? She has a plan. Yes. More bureaucracy. Okay. Well, we'll explain. Maybe we need more bureaucrats. Maybe we need more stakeholders. How about stakeholders? And will we have a consensus group put together of stakeholders and a big meeting? and then we'll decide who gets hired and who gets the, you know, the nonprofit group money? I mean, what, what does she say? Well, yeah, and you know it'll be really serious if it's a Blue Ribbon Committee.

Oh, is that what she's calling it? No, no, she isn't. Yeah, so, I mean, a little back, I mean, we all know that the economy is really sluggish here in Oregon, and yet to give Tina Kotech some credit for that. She recognizes that. But she says, you know what, we're doing, we're just going to grow the economy. She doesn't say how, but we're going to do it. And then she lays out this roadmap.

And I was looking at the roadmap, I'm like, you know, I've lived in Oregon for more than 20 years. Like, I think I've heard all this before. So I did some digging. Her plans are virtually the same plans that were proposed by Neil Goldschmidt, by Ted Kulengoski, by John Kittsauber. And in fact, it's almost a carbon copy of Kate Brown's strategic plan. I mean, there's nothing new. We've been doing this for 35 years, and things have gotten worse. Maybe the whole prosperity by committee isn't working.

Well, isn't it, you know, the way I was looking at the state of Oregon, I have not looked deeply into the prosperity roadmap yet from Governor Kotech, but the way I would tend to look at the Oregon economy is that there are some structural imbalances or anti-competitiveness aspects of just the way Oregon is built right now and the way it operates that would make it very difficult to be a prosperous state. Is that a fair way of looking at things? You're right. If you want to roll back the clock a little bit, so you can go back 20 years, right?

We had a state that some disagree. We had a state that was fairly low tax and fairly high services. People were getting banged for their buck. now that is all diminished we now have some of the highest taxes in the country and some of the worst services so in some ways they broke that contract with the people of Oregon and so what you have are you know kind of the two big one big thing well three big things one is we have high taxes and you know the cat tax the the corporate activities tax is just the latest of those and we also have a high income tax and it's quite regressive you get to the top rate

pretty darn quickly if you were a wage earner. Oh, yeah. You can be in poverty and be pretty close to the top tax rate. So you've got those high taxes. You also have Perth. I mean, I know people don't want to talk about Perth. But Perz is just creating this huge fiscal vise. That's why we have declining services.

And then we just have enormous regulations. I just saw it say it, said that Oregon is the seventh most regulated state in the country. And so if you think about it, take kind of what I would call a clean slate approach. If you're just sitting there, let's say you're in Kansas. You're going to think, huh, I should build a new factory or open a new office. Where should I do it? And you look at Oregon and you're going to say, why would I even want to think about coming to Oregon? There's so many other places that are so much more attractive.

And some might say, oh, gee, well, you know, we've got great views of mouth. Well, that, you know, that doesn't pay the bill. But you see, that almost seems to be the way Oregon is wanted to sell itself. Come here, we're really pretty. Of course, we'll make your life miserable if you try to do anything productive. I think that's our bottom line in Oregon the way it is. Well, that's right. That's right.

And so now what's happened is the state is kind of been in this, you know, what some people call the doom loop, right? Because you have high taxes and lower services that's driving people out. And when people drive out, then that reduces taxes revenues even further, which declined the service is even further. And then you're back to more people leaving. I'm going to give a speech next week, and one of the things I found is the top 1% of Oregon taxpayers provide something like 22% of the state's revenues.

And that's a small number of people, right? So that's like 22,000 people. If 1% of that 1% left the state, so about 250 people, the state loses about $27 million in revenue. Okay, well, let me ask you then a question. Are you familiar with Dutch Bros. Coffee here in Southern Oregon? Oh, yeah. Okay.

Well, Travis Borsma ended up just picking up stakes and has moved the company headquarters out. And we're talking, of course, billions of dollars in business, I would imagine. Is that an example of that 1% of 1% just saying, hey, we're taken off? Well, that's right. And you know what's great about Dutch bros is they're a big company, their beloved company, and that makes headlines. What we don't see is the little accounting firm that's based in Portland and says, I'm sick of paying these taxes. I'm moving my firm over to Vancouver or when some bank decides to close its Portland office and move all its people over to Vancouver. those don't make headlines because you're not talking about a lot of people in those in those stories,

but you add up all those little stories, and it becomes pretty big. A couple weeks ago, I went over to the farmer's market in Vancouver, Washington, walked along the waterfront, as far as you can see, brand new condos and hotels. And I was talking to my wife, and I say, you know, every one of those condos is filled with an Oregon refugee. That's what's happening. I think you can just, you can visually see the impact of our failed policies. And by the way, I don't look at Washington as being a great state either, but it's better than Oregon. Is that it?

Right. Well, the funny thing, that used to be Oregon selling point is, hey, look, we're kind of messed up, but we're not as messed up as California. Right. The problem is now we are more messed up in California, and so a lot of Californians aren't coming here. So, you know, we've got a real problem with people, what I say, voting with their feet. And, you know, how do you turn that around? You know, there was one solution that people came up with in the 60s. It was called the Berlin Wall.

But the problem is the Columbia River isn't a Berlin Wall. You can cross the bridge. Well, just don't replace the bridge and let it fall down, and then everything will be fine, Dr. Fruits. There you go. That's me. That's what they want. Yeah, I'm just kidding with you on this one. Dr. Eric Fruits' economist here by trade, and I wanted to also, so in other words, Tina Kotech's

road economic roadmap is no difference than the other ones, and they didn't accomplish their goal either. Okay, so more of the same. Okay. Well, in two years, it'll be on the shelf next to all the other one. Okay, got it. All right. Now, I wanted to talk, though, about a piece that Taxpayers Association of Oregon Foundation

that you ended up submitting to them, and it's making it. some news here because it's talking about the collapse of Portland. And I was talking about this a little bit earlier this morning. And I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of economic collapse as it's an event. It's something which just happened. But it's really a process that takes time. It's over a period. Isn't that the case with Portland and others? Yes. Yes. It takes a long time. And the reason why I wrote that is because a lot of my friends on the right say, oh, you know, it's okay. We just need to hit bottom. And then we can turn things around. And my argument is, guys, we're still probably about another 20 years away

from actually hitting bottom. So the bad news is we have a long way to fall. The good news is we still have time to stop it or turn it around. But, you know, if you look at places like Detroit and Pittsburgh and Stockton, California, which all had just, you know, which essentially went bankrupt, they all took like anywhere from 20 to 50 years. to actually hit bottom. I remember when I went back to living in the Pittsburgh area for about six months in the late 80s, and you just realized that the decay was still going on. The decay had really started, I would say, in the mid-1970s is when it started, and it played out.

But it wasn't until early 2000s that Pittsburgh ended up being taken over by the state, if I recall correctly, maybe it was, or maybe they're just monitoring the finances. they had to get approval for everything from the state because everything is such a problem. Yeah, and Pittsburgh is, you know, it's a sad story, the one that you just told, but there's an upside story because once they were under that supervision, they dealt with their pensions, they streamline the employment in the city in terms of the public workers. And Pittsburgh is now, but Pittsburgh is now today where Portland was in the early 2000s. I mean, it's a place where people, they want to visit, and they want to live.

And so you can't turn it around, but you can't turn it around by just doing little tinkering things and having, you know, streamlining permitting. No, you have to have radical overhauls. And that's why my argument is, look, Per's, Bill Knight said Peres will sink the state. And he's 100% right. It will sink the state, but it'll think the state in little ways over time. Well, it's going, and it's going to sink the state in other areas. not going to be just Portland, even though Portland is the piece, is the city you were talking about in this piece.

Every city, every county is having to reduce services in order to pay, well, pay the inflated unwise promises of the past. Isn't that the case? Oh, yeah. You look at every level. State, county, city, school districts, fire districts. purse is killing all of them. I've said that what I think should happen is those local government

leaders are the ones who should spend every day in the next legislative session telling the legislature they need to fix purse. They won't listen to me because I'm a crazy right-of-center nut, right? But they will listen to elected officials, especially Democratic elected officials in local government who say, oh my gosh, this is killing us. And I think, you know, I've said that the mayor of Portland should go down there and say you need to fix purse. The school board members should go down so you need to fix pers. That's the only way they'll listen. How do you think that purrs could be attacked?

Because what you're always going to hear, and this is what we get, and people say, well, we signed a contract. There's a contract, and the contract is this, and we can't change anything. And, of course, what do you have? In Oregon, you have judges that are on purrs deciding about purrs. So that's certainly an issue. so what do we change the laws do we make able to renegotiate because what I've been advocating for years not that I'm happy about it but I can add and

subtract and I know you can much better than me all right that would it be better to negotiate with the unions right now and say hey I'm sorry we can give you 80% of something or 100% of nothing if we change the constitution and go bankrupt or something I mean what what would you say what would you advocate for something well I think the problem If the problem is the Constitution, then we need to change the Constitution.

And other states have done so. And so it is doable. And I think what we need to do is just put a tiny one-line provision in the Constitution that says that legislatively determined employee benefits are not considered contractual arrangements. And so you can still have that provision that the state can't interfere in contracts. But you say, look, if the legislature determines what benefits are, and that's what happens, then that is not a contract. That would allow the legislature then to do PERS reforms

without them getting overturned by the Supreme Court. And what kind of reforms do you think would be the wisest at this point? I know this is a big, big deal, and I know there are people on PERS that are just kind of spitting their coffee out right now. But, you know, the money's not there, and people will say, well, I had a contract, and this is what we were promised back then. Hey, listen, you know, Social Security is being defaulted on,

right now too from everybody else because every time they change the benefits or every time they don't they change the rules or there's less than cost of living proper cost of living that's essentially a little bit of a default promises or renegotiated this time goes on if it's not there i'm just saying yeah well the big problem still is tier one and people think that the tier one problem is done those are the oldest members of purrs uh and people say oh well once the Tier 1 people are gone or dead or whatever, then the problem is solved. The problem is some of the youngest Tier 1 members are still in their 50s. They've still got another 30, 40 years to go.

By the way, if you're in Per's Tier 1 right now, are you still getting rewarded as if you were the Purr's Tier 1 of 20 years ago, or do you get it on the new rules? How does that work? I don't know. So if you started in tier one, you are always in tier one. If I was a public employee, I would be furious about this system because you can have two people staying next to each other doing the exact same work in the exact same office for exact same salary.

And one is a lot richer than the other because one is in tier one and the other one is just because of the accident of when they were hired. Yeah, all animals are, all state workers are equal, some are more equal than others, right? that kind of thing. The animal farm per system. Gotcha. All right. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's so we really need to deal with that. And part of it is, you know, we might need to readjust. Under the current system, there's two ways when you retire under tier one. You can either get what's known as money match or, or a formula plan. And by law, the state has to provide the highest of the two. And, you know, maybe you can adjust that. Maybe you could get rid of what's known as money match. That could solve part of the problem. Maybe you can stop any sort of cost-of-living adjustments. You can adjust the way in which accounts are credited, how their accounts can grow. What about the aspect of PERS, which everybody knows how the scam works?

All right, you're a fire department chief. Well, everybody becomes a fire department chief. Everybody becomes a city manager, at least for two or three years. everybody becomes an administrator of some sort for two or three years. You know, police chief, whatever it is. And that ends up determining what your entire retirement is rather than the bulk of your service. And it just seems like the biggest scam in the world.

Everybody knows how it works here, Professor. Well, if you really want to get angry, you've got to look at people who serve for a long time in the legislature. And as you probably know, legislators don't get paid much. I will admit that. They do not get paid much at all. But you have someone who's in the legislature for a long time. Usually what will happen is at the end, they will get what I call, they'll get beamed up to the mothership.

They will get placed in some cozy, you know, $150,000, $200,000 position. Yeah, you're running the Northwest Power Administration or something. Yeah, that's the magic one. If you get that, I mean, you've just, you've hit the lottery. Yeah, that's how you get rewarded for carrying the water for a number of years. So, yeah, you could be working for 15 years at $30,000 a year, and all of a sudden your pension is based upon making $200,000 a year because you spent your last three years at the Northwest. But that's what I'm getting at. That entire concept that, you know, two or three years determines everything and you ignore all the rest of it is just nonsense.

And you can't afford a system like that. It doesn't pencil. No, it doesn't. And that's the problem. And the way that hers works is this, all of that, it's fun. down to what's known as the employer. So it gets funneled down to the government that's hiring that person. So the state government or the school district government is paying that.

And so when you look at these things and some of these purrs rates are 30% of payroll. So if you hire someone at the school district, or say $100,000 a year, that person right off the top is going to cost you $130,000 just because of purrs. And so that makes the public employees so expensive, which means you have to have fewer of them. That's why we have huge class sizes and really high student-to-teacher ratios because teachers are so expensive. And if you ask a teacher, how much are you getting paid? They'll say, I'm not really getting paid that much. And they're right.

Most of the cost of that teacher is the benefits that they're getting that they hardly ever see. That's the total compensation package, rather. Dr. Fruit said... If I were a public employee, I'd be mad. Yeah. So let me take it back then to the Portland aspect of this collapse. Where would you say that Portland, you know, in the beginning, middle end, where are we right now? Could it be turned back? Will it be turned back, given your experience in Oregon? I would say we are probably about 10 to 15 years into what could be a 30-year decline. So we are roughly in the middle. So we still have time to turn things back. You know, there's. I don't know if you know, but in Multnomah County, we have our own income tax. It's really over it. The metro-regional government has its own income tax on both personal and business.

Those taxes should be just eliminated. That would send a strong signal that we're back in business. The other thing we need to do in Portland is we do need to address the livability. We need to get the criminals off the streets. We've got to stop the open-air drug dealing. Yeah, I don't think you're going to get businesses or people to come back until there is truly peace in the streets. And it ain't happening there right now. We know it. Everybody knows it. Well, yeah, to be fair, I go through Portland quite a bit.

And in terms of the dinginess, the crime and so forth, it has gotten quite a bit better. But you still drive through the city, and you could just be block after block of empty storefront. on the first floor, right? Because, you know, I don't know if you saw this, but the Nordstrom-Rack, which has been there since 1986, is going to close at the end of January. That's, you know, about half a block of retail that's now going to be empty.

And it'll be empty for a decade. You know, we've got to figure out a way to get people to not just work, but also live downtown. And work from home is a real challenge because I work from home, and I love it. I'm never going back to it. an office. Yeah, don't blame you. Right? Yeah. And I mean, it doesn't matter where I live. I wouldn't go back to an office. But then when you pile on the fact that, you know, there's a perception that downtown's

not safe. And in Portland, they make it just misery to get anywhere around in the city. They put in, you know, bike lanes, bus lanes, crazy little spike sticks around that tell you where to go, where not to go. And I drive through there with my wife. And I say, oh, my gosh, I was a tourist, I would easily get a ticket. And by the way, our smaller cities are trying to do different versions of this, too. We make it miserable to get around. It's an anti-car. That's a state policy issue.

All of these are generally at the root, wouldn't you say state policy, state-driven, overall? Yeah. And the thing is, that's the big problem we have. It's not just one thing. It's a bunch of, it's a couple of big things and a lot of little things. Right? So if you had to go after the big stuff, you need to tackle purrs. You need to tackle taxes. You need to tackle safety. If you do that, if you do those three things, you're going to go a long way. And then you could start working on the other things like, let's make it easier for people to travel quickly and safely throughout the state and our city. Let's make it easier to build something, build a retail space, build a factory. You know, let's get get rid of design review. Let's get real a lot of our zoning. You know, let's

just say, if you want to build something, build it. How about repeal SB 100? The entire route. The entire route of what is called state land use planning. What do you say? I think so, too. I've just read the story today. Someone's saying, how come

China doesn't have any suburbs? And one of the answers was because the Chinese government says that cities need to be self-sufficient in their own food production. So they have to have a bunch of farmland outside of the cities to feed their cities. I thought, oh, my gosh, that sounds exactly like S-B-100. Right. You have these cities with stack and pack towers, and then around that you have,

you know, these kind of, you know, agricultural land and little, you know, farmats. Well, yeah, farmats and now solar farms, which aren't farms at all. There you go. Okay. Dr. Fruits, I appreciate the call. We'll have you back here. I'm going to put your piece up here today, and you have another one out there on Governor Kotech. I'll have to put them both up if you don't mind, all right? Thanks so much. Yeah, please too. All right. Thanks a great talking to you. Thank you. Dr. Eric Fruits, 732 at KMED. Get rewarded when you shop Grange Co-op. December 5th through the 7th, the more you spend on clothing, the more you get back. Spend $100 and get a $20 gift card. Spend $250 and get $60 back. Or go.

Prepare, you can trust. Count on your local expert for over 30 years. American Industrial Door in Center Point and Grants Pass. 734 at KMED. Former State Senator Alan DeBore. Hello, Alan. How you doing this morning? Good. How are you? You wanted to weigh in on the Eric Fruits talk here just a moment ago about the collapse of Portland

and the economic roadmap that Governor Kotech has put out there, which appears to be like all the other governors have put out there. What are you thinking? Well, Eric Fruits, when I was in the Senate, had the most influential. information and things that he sent to the leadership about problems and solving them. And I would take those to the Democrats in the Senate, and they discounted him as a nut. They wouldn't pay any attention to anything he sent. And his stuff was really accurate, really well done, and I really appreciated his input.

Could you tell, you couldn't tell the Democrats then to follow the economic science, if you want to call it that kind of, follow the science? All you have to do is just tell them, follow the science, and then they usually get in line here, Senator. Yeah, and boy, you know, and I blame the union leaders, not union members. I support unions, and I support the members, but their leaders are completely out of touch. Would you agree with Eric's take, though, that PERS is probably the number one, number one state finance? thing which will have to be reformed and there's going to have to be a way to to break that inviability of the agreement that it has to be renegotiated what do you think i don't you don't agree with you don't you don't agree with them i follow i follow pers and i actually tried to get on the

pers board purrs is one of i think the 86 one of the top funded retirements in the nation every year they have more money than they started with so i don't know what the problem is with purrs other than keeping it out front. Now, I know that the, well, the local employers, though, are certainly having problems. You know, the government's because cost of, you know, the cost of the pension is just insane as part of the total compensation. Exactly. And I don't know why.

I mean, if we're one of the top-funded retirements, I mean, nobody brings that out. And I get a report. I think I only get five numbers. And it makes it real simple. Do you have more money at the end of the year? And they do every year. I haven't done 24. All right.

Hey, I appreciate the call, and, hey, we'll get you back on that. Okay, thank you so much, State Senator. Former State Senator Alan DeBoer, 737. We'll catch up on the news now. News brought to you by Millette Construction. Doors or windows. Call Millet Construction for a no-pressure, thorough inspection of your home's foundation and a no-obligation estimate.

Visit milletconstruction.com. Hi, I'm Steve Potter, Body Shop Manager of LithuBody and Paint, and I'm on 106.7, KMED. 739. We talked off and on a bit about the roadway surveillance. And, of course, everybody knows about the flock traffic license plate readers that are popping up. There's a bunch of them here in Southern Oregon, mostly in Medford, some in Grants Pass. I don't think Ashland has taken any of those yet.

But there is beginning to be a nationwide swell and pushback against that. And I wanted to talk with, I don't know if it's a competitor to flock or just a completely different organization altogether. But he is here. that is Charlie DeGlielmini, he's executive vice president of AI roadway technology company Recore Systems. And what does Recore provide, Charlie? Welcome to the show. It's good to have you on. Good morning. Good morning, Bill. Great to be here. Our Recore system is a roadway intelligence company, and we work across a number of different verticals. We do a lot of work for state departments of transportation. We help use AI to work inside of traffic management centers, where, we can tease up information about an incident that's happening on the roadway before a human being

can essentially giving those people in the traffic management centers almost superhuman powers, right? They're able to see incidents quicker, faster, and more accurately than they would otherwise. We also do things like identifying the types of vehicles that are on the roadway. This is for DOT reporting, right? States and municipalities need to report what types of vehicles are traveling on their roadways in order to get back federal funding. And finally, where I think this conversation is going, we started out in the ALPR business, and we still are in the ALPR business. Are you into the speed camera business, too, or is that something different? I just want to make sure I know all the pies you're involved in. Are you part of that? We are not. We are not. We do not operate any system that sends a

summons or a ticket to anybody's mailbox. We do not do that. Oh, okay. All right. Well, Well, the automated license plate readers here, that is the thing, and we have them here in Southern Oregon, and there is a growing, bubbling, simmering discontent about having license plates photograph. Now, law enforcement will always come out there and say, hey, this can be very helpful for us, and I get this. But my concern about it and others have been bringing this up to is that essentially you are building a state travel database, a dossier on vehicles, and their travel. patterns. I don't know how you could not do something like that. Maybe I don't understand how the system works, and maybe you could talk about what you do as contrasted with Flock, and which must be one of your competitors since you were in the license plate reader business, too, at one point. Yeah, we are indeed, but really you're bringing up some great points, and two things can be true

at the same time, right? So is this, I think we would all agree that if there is a child abduction or, God forbid, a silver alert where some of our elderly relatives might be on the road and we can't find them, that you would want to use every means possible in order to find those vehicles, save the child, help the person who potentially has the venture and is driving on the roadway and doesn't know where they are. I think we could all agree on that. But on the other hand, and you're exactly right, Bill, this is a becoming, and I've been in this business for a while now, it's now becoming a national conversation between what's the balance between protecting our privacy and doing public good, right, improving public safety.

We at Recore have thought about this for a while, and one of the things that we actually pat did some technology, which will separate what a police department needs for its everyday operations from the sensitive information and only connect that with when the law permits it, right, or when an agency, or when a municipality, or whether a city council decides it can be released. And just very quickly, the way we do that is we take the vehicle data, and so the license plate tracks back to the register owners. I think we all know that. Right. But what our technology can do is we can completely anonymize that capture. and it can only be released if there is a warrant or if there's some legal proceeding or

you can set up whatever kind of safeguards you would like. It may be something like something being signed off by the law department inside a municipality to say, okay, go and de-identify this data. But until that point, you're not taking, you know, there's 80,000 cameras out there and they're all, they're mass collagulating all this data, and it's just sitting there, right? And that's why we've been reading these stories about data seed breaches. There's been security and cybersecurity concerns. There's been concerns about sending this data overseas, which no one really talks about.

Companies do this. We don't, and we think it's a practice that is problematic, almost from a national security perspective. Okay. Now, hold up. I wanted to investigate that here briefly. So we'll have situations in which traffic pattern data will be sent overseas because the laws are lax. Is that kind of what I'm interpreting this as? Yeah, there's no regulation on it, right? So it's done for companies do this. They have contracts with authorities and municipalities and states.

And they say, okay, we need to train our AI data. And how do you train that? you have to teach it what to do. So they'll take raw video, and they'll send it overseas. And there's no regulation on whether once it hits an overseas server, if it's transferred someplace where it shouldn't be, if it's, is it being sold, right? We don't know that.

And it's a practice. It's an unspoken practice. And we as a company, we've been evangelizing this now, probably throughout the entire year of 2025, and we're going to keep doing this into 26. that this is a dangerous and it should not be happening, right? So the company that sends its data overseas, I don't think, is really concerned about privacy. Now, I'm presuming, though, that the flock systems that are currently in many of the cities,

or most of the cities, I would guess, at this point, from the sounds of it, are they your direct competitor? We do compete against them, right? We do have, we don't have as many customers, quite frankly, They do. They're in 49 states. They have 80,000 cameras. And I think that's why this national conversation, because it's become so ubiquitous and it's grown in such a complete and kind of a comprehensive way, then more and more you're hearing about, okay, there is a system and it has a problem with cybersecurity or there's a system. And the way they're training their data is they're sending it overseas for review and then annotation.

Is that what happens with the flock? Is that what happens with the flock system? Yeah, I mean, it's all public information. I mean, we're all reading stories, and the stories are coming out virtually every day about what, you know, that are their practices correct? Are they really doing the right things? But once again, I want to go back to the idea. There is a solution to this, right?

If you anonymize the data, right? And you only unencrypt that data when there is a process in place for, look, if a agency, a police department wants to get your cell phone data, they've got to go to a judge. And the judge has to say it's okay to look at Charlie Diggly-Omini's phone. If not, they can't do it. And why should it be any different for, you know, our information from our cars, which effectively tracks to us as owners? Okay. In the way I would then see it, when you're talking about, I'm just trying to understand what anonymized means. So let's say, all right, I'm driving through Medford or Grants Pass or any place where a camera might be. It snaps a picture of my license plate, goes into the server, into the database, but it is, is it completely scrambled in some point? Does it have like a database that people just looking at the database wouldn't know what it meant? wouldn't say, okay, here's my license plate, 997EW, whatever, you know. Right.

That's how that works. It does. I mean, you're describing it respectively correctly. What it does, it's a cryptographic, just will use a technical term, a cryptographic cash tag, right? Uh-huh. So your license plate, ABC 1, 2, 3 doesn't show up as ABC 1, 2, 3. It's a long string of characters that need to be unencrypted in order to get the actual,

so isn't that, think about it for a second. Isn't that a great safeguard, right? So while your data is sitting inside this database, it has no use to anybody looking at it unless somebody comes along with legal authority to say, okay, now we need to unlock that hashtag in order to see what the actual plate really is because it's a serious crime that's taken place. It can be done. It's not, you know, and like I said, we patented this because we saw this coming. And we knew.

And look, we're hoping that, once again, that we can help strike this balance between privacy and meeting the needs of what police departments need to do to protect us and to increase public safety. When something is, by the way, I'm speaking with Charlie DeGleomini, and he's the executive vice president of recourse systems. It's an AI, I, rather, roadway technology firm here. And we're talking about trying to make the license plate readers

in such surveillance, at least more secure and not just mindlessly data-bating Americans. So what gets collected then when you snap a picture of the vehicle going by? Is there AI that is used then to determine who the driver is, perhaps, through facial recognition software that might be available? What is everything that is grabbed right now that you're aware of? Right. We don't do that. I mean, when our systems look at the vehicle, we're looking at a kind of a perpendicular view. We're not zooming in past the glass, right? So it is the body panels.

It's the license plate, of course. And this is technology that started 25, 30 years ago, as just the recognition of the numbers and letters on a license plate is now expanded into the characteristics of the vehicle to make the model the color. Yeah, because you can have a license plate that's stolen and put on another vehicle. happens all the time, right? It happens all the time. And often when crimes are committed, someone will see, they'll know it's a Red Ford 150, but they don't know what the license plate is.

So then the police departments can go and they can look for a Red Ford 150 without a license plate information. All right. So that's how this would work then. We have all these strings of characters that would mean nothing if somebody were to get a hold of this, right? but let's say the police department or the district attorney law enforcement officials or whatever it is they have a deal and so they say I'm looking for a Ford F-150 at a certain amount of time

and then it gets decrypted is that correct yeah that's correct now look I think in certain instances you would want instantaneous views right so let's let's use the amber alert and God forbid a child is abducted and you want to know like on the spot because this just happened a minute ago, right? So there's something called an NCI. It's a federal database. It's a hot list, right? Agencies create their own hot list. We need to find this car right now.

And I think in that instance, you would not want to do anything to slow it up. You don't want to wait for a warrant to show up or you don't want to wait for a legal opinion from the city attorney to say, okay, please go look at this data. you have probable cause to do so, right? You want to get that information out quickly. So it's a little nuanced. I think in certain exigent circumstances, you need to immediately see the vehicle and do everything you can to interdict somebody who's in danger to a child or danger to us as a society as they're doing something terrible, right? You want to do that. But what happens is for investigatory purposes, you can take a step back, right? You can completely

encrypt this data and only release it when there is, you know, probable cause to do so. Interesting, Charlie, and this is different the way that the other company is doing it. Is that clear? It is. Yeah, it is. It is clear, right? There is a, like I said, there's a national conversation going on now that, you know, there are certain safeguards in place like a drop-down menu where you can put in the reason for a search,

but you can put anything in there, right? You can, you know, you can use a case number. Okay, this case numbers help probably, but you can use a different case number or an old case number, right? The only way to empirically to absolutely positively protect ourselves from misuse of technology to protect everybody's privacy is put it under encryption, right? Encrypt it, stop it from being visible. It's like you said before, Bill, it's exactly on point.

It's useless. It's just a string of characters. So even if someone hacks into the server, the local servers, or any of the other servers, it doesn't mean anything to them. Absolutely correct. That's interesting. Charlie Degliomini once again, and it's recourse systems. Someone may have a question about this.

I haven't had a chance to screen it, but I'm just going to take it live without a net. Hi, good morning. Who's this? Welcome. My name's Dave. How are you? Yeah, Dave. Do you want to ask Charlie a question about this?

Go ahead. I do. So my understanding is there's, I think, 87,000 nationwide out there of these cameras. That's correct. Okay, so, and you've installed some of them, a percentage of them, correct? Yes. My question, Bill, I guess, is I don't know anybody, and I've asked many people, has anybody seen any of these cameras go up?

They just appeared one day. and I've seen them actually get updated, but never seen the physical work on the polls themselves. Is that something you've seen, or how do you know? It seems like they're going up in the dead of night. Yeah, it just has been my impression, Dave. I appreciate the call, but yeah, he would, thank you for that. I don't want to put words in his mouth here, Charlie, but it does seem like, you know,

who does put him up and who the company the companies do bill and look this has been another problem right there's a number of stories it's all public information about about certain companies that are putting up um poles without the proper permissions right installing them on state rightaways you know perhaps you know not in the right spot or you mean these aren't even necessarily cameras that the the city asked for what a county asked for is that what you're me? No, no, I think there is, there is a, there is a customer, right? But there are, there's a proper procedure for installing a pole on a side of any road, right, because you need a clear zone. So much you, God forbid, crash into a pole, the camera can fall down, hit them, potentially

injure, or, God forbid, kill them. Right. So you need permits to do that. You need to file plans. You need to make sure your bases are correct that you have the right type of pole that you're installing, right? And you need to have fidelity to all this. You have to be really, really intentional about filing for permits and doing all these installations in the right way. Once again, this is the problem when companies do things at massive scale and they're running and gunning all the time.

They're not thinking about this. And there's been stories about improper installations. Thankfully, it hasn't happened with recourse systems. We're very, very careful about. When we install, we send our guys out, and they do it up with the proper authority and the proper permits. Yeah, because I have noticed, but of course, it's one of those things where, yeah, well, all of a sudden you just notice the poll and go, hey, what's that? You know, it's what's... Yeah, I think they can go up pretty quickly.

I mean, it's probably just a couple of hours worth of work. It's not something that's a multi-day project. All right. Easily understood. Well, this is interesting. I'd like to find out more. What is your website? Because I'd like to find out more about this and see and contrast the differences, because, like I said,

said we, you know, there's kind of a, there's, we're not as heavily camera, camera filled as some cities. I imagine some big cities are really carpeted with a lot of this, but I like to find out more. And where do you go? Where do you go? Three core systems, that's R-E-K-O-R-A-I. And you can find out more about us at our website. All right. And are the costs comparable to the competition?

How does that work for the cities? Yes. Yes, it's approximately the same cost plus or minus. All right, but a little more, well, actually, maybe a lot more safety on the data from our talk. No question about it. Look, we really think this is a time to rethink the way automatic license plate reading is being done across the nation. And let's do it in a safer way that protects privacy, but also helps the police officer on the beat. All right.

Charlie, I appreciate the call. And thanks for sharing a few thoughts about that. that, okay? You'd be well. My pleasure. Happy holidays, indeed. Merry Christmas. Charlie Degliomini, Executive Vice President of Recourse Systems. 7508 at KMAD.