A renewal is the 1 scheduled moment a Flock contract must survive a public decision. This page walks through what the records show about renewals, and what to know before yours.
When renewals happen
Most tracked contracts run 1 to 2 years, and several renew automatically unless a body acts: Monroe County, IN had 2-year auto-renewing terms until commissioners voted 2-0 to terminate. The record for your city shows its end date where public records state one; 64 of the 332 endings on the tracker carry a documented end date.
What renewal votes look like
Close, increasingly. Warren renewed 4-3 after a council member moved her vote between meetings. Berkeley renewed 5-4. Toledo renewed 8-4 with every name in the journal. Cleveland cut its renewal to 6 months, 9-6, and restricted a regional fusion center’s access in the same vote. Renewals also fail: Denver let its contract expire and removed all 110 cameras.
Terms move at renewal
Renewal is when conditions get attached. Records document retention cut from 365 days to 30 in San Jose, a 45-day retention target ordered in Costa Mesa, camera caps and federal-sharing limits adopted 3-2 in Bartlesville, and council sign-off required for future upgrades. The contract your city renews is negotiable at exactly this moment.
Before the meeting
Read your city’s record and its sources. Check the agenda for the item number. If the vote is scheduled, the record carries the date and the homepage clock counts it down. And whatever happens, the outcome lands here: tallies, names where recorded, and the next date to watch.
What the tracker watches
2 dated things, both drawn from documents: a documented contract end date, and a scheduled public meeting where a governing body has a Flock item on its agenda. Both appear on the decision calendar, and the alerts list emails roughly 90 days before a deadline and roughly 14 days before a meeting. A large share of records carry no end date at all, because the document that would state it has never been published, so those generate no warning until one surfaces.
What actually happens at a renewal
4 outcomes show up in the records. A straight renewal, sometimes at a higher price. A shortened renewal that buys time, like Cleveland cutting a 1-year, 250,000-dollar request to 6 months at 125,000 dollars while it looks for another vendor. A lapse, like Salem letting its term run out on June 30, 2026 and replacing the system with city-owned readers. Or an early termination before the term ends, like Harrisonburg voting 4 to 0 to stop the cameras within 7 days.
The vote you may not get
Renewals do not always reach a council. Richmond bought through a procurement vendor and extended for another fiscal year with no council vote in the record. Park Ridge went the other way: because the contract was sole-source, the extension needed a supermajority, and the 5 to 1 result on July 20, 2026 turned on the mayor casting the deciding vote. Knowing which path your city uses tells you whether a public meeting is where the decision happens.
Before your renewal
Pull the current contract and the invoices through a records request, since the term length and any auto-renewal clause decide when the real deadline falls. Read the exit terms: Lynnwood forfeited remaining value to leave early, and Killingworth still owes an unstated exit fee. Check whether the money is local, because a grant-funded contract like Bandera’s changes what a council is actually deciding.