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The Watertown Area Chamber of Commerce is thrilled to welcome BNI Watertown as a new Chamber member and celebrate with an official ribbon-cutting.

JEFFERSON — Music, entertainment and costumes filled Jefferson County Fair Park this weekend for the three-day fall Gemuetlichkeit Days Festival. 

As Kikkoman Foods prepares to begin production in Jefferson, the company announced a $250,000 gift to the Jefferson County Parks Department to support local native prairie restoration efforts. Yuzaburo Mogi, Kikkoman Corporation Honorary CEO and Chairman of the Board, presented the gift during a grand opening event on Sept. 18 at Kikkoman’s new manufacturing facility.

WATERTOWN — Police Chief Dave Brower is sticking by the use of Flock Safety cameras and asked the Common Council for its input on the use of the automated license plate reader cameras. Brower's comments on Tuesday came after Jefferson County Sheriff Travis Maze said he “voluntarily suspended” the use of Flock Safety cameras and the Lake Mills Police Department announced it is “opting out” of its contract. "ALPR has become one of the most effective tools in American law enforcement," Brower said. "Flock Safety, used by more than 7,000 agencies across 49 states, has become the gold standard. It's not theory. It's not hypotheticals. It's a measurable daily force of justice at work. 120,000 cameras solving crimes across America, bringing justice.The chief said 10 more Flock cameras were approved and funded in the 2026 budget by the council. "Each camera costs about $3,000 per year," Brower said. "That cost is minimal when weighed against the cost savings from efficiently resolving a single major crime. That cost is absolutely nothing when weighed against a single life saved."We are planning to place them at the major roadways into Watertown and at one strategic high-traffic location inside the city. We need to know who is coming into our community to commit crimes and we need the ability to receive help from neighboring cities, when criminals here flee to avoid arrest and continue their crimes elsewhere." He specifically credited Flock's assistance with bringing charges to Jeffrey Redecker, who entered no contest guilty pleas in August for a vehicular homicide last December. "We had very little to go on-a vehicle description in color," he said. "Without Flock, that case would not have been solved. An arrest would not have happened for homicide by intoxicated use of motor vehicle."If we had taken the usual approach without ALPR, hours or days spent combing through registration records, we would have lost all hope of a prosecution. The suspect would have moved his vehicle, cleaned it, invented an alibi, sobered up and simply refused to speak. Justice was achieved only because of ALPR." Brower's comments followed concerns raised by members of the public regarding the cameras. "I hear people say they fear being watched. I understand that. I don't like being watched either," Brower said. "But I would remind people: every store you walk into has cameras."Your cell phone provider alone tracks more about you than any government ever could. Private companies collect mountains of personal data with no judges, no juries, no oversight."Law enforcement is different. We operate under oversight every single day: judges, juries, defense attorneys, city councils, constitutional limits-all watch us closely. Sincerely, I share the American instinct to distrust unchecked power. I live by the adage: we must never sacrifice essential liberty to purchase temporary safety. If ALPR ever crossed that line, or if shifts in society push it towards that line, I would pull that plug myself." District 7 Alder Tony Arnett inquired about Flock data releasing without agency permission, like the case with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. Brower said this was due to an open records request made by USA Today, but that this request wouldn't be approved in a state like Wisconsin and that Flock has since changed its policy. "An agency on that West Coast complied with the open records request, which then released log information," Brower said. "That log information was connected to other agencies across the nation that shared data using this method...They asked just for log information."Those agencies on that west coast, responding to a judge's opinion, did something that I would not expect to happen in Wisconsin or in our neck of the woods: they gave that information...(And) not just that agency's information went into the request to USA Today. "(It's a) very difficult, complicated, convoluted method to get around an agency like mine having its information in that released database - information we never had the opportunity to address in our open records decision-making process. Flock has since changed its record-keeping so this can't happen again. They've made it safe so that now, if an open records request comes to Flock about a camera in Watertown, it has to come to Watertown. It doesn't just get unintentionally released by some other agency." District 2 Alder Jonathan Lampe said that while Flock is a very cost-effective way to solve crimes, there are a few items he would like to see established in a written policy. "In particular, the four attributes that I see would help gain some community trust on this are retention of material, appropriate use...the application of the data that's collected (license plates) and third-party use. Those are the four elements I suggest we surface at a high level to use as the framework, similar to the emergency shelter piece, where we established a high-level policy and left the procedure for the city to pursue." District 1 Alder Dana Davis provided several comments on Flock, two being the need for transparency and a shortened data-retention period. "One of the ways to build trust is to be transparent," Davis said. "What we've seen in a lot of communities is that they take advantage of Flock's transparency portal, where the community then, with this free portal, lists the number of cameras they have, the number of searches done every month, who they're sharing data with, who they're receiving data from, or who who is accessing their data, how many hits? They even have the redacted audit log as an option, and that transparency portal would be very valuable as well, so that we can actually see what is happening with flock cameras in our community."The most common policy I found is 30 days (for data retention). But interestingly, Green Bay just had a really interesting news conference...They're actually revamping that now, and they put that policy out for public input. One of the things they're doing is changing the retention period for images not tagged to investigations from 30 days to seven days. It's so that we don't have that dragnet, that unlimited amount of data that can be searched through, which causes temptation and creates an opportunity for misuse." This topic will be discussed again by the council in October. 

WATERTOWN — The City of Watertown Common Council approved the second reading of The Oxbow's amended general development and precise implementation plans.

On Sunday, Aug. 30, the Watertown Tennis Association hosted a tennis tournament and fundraiser benefiting the Dominic Leija Build a Better World Memorial Fund.