No Flock Yucca Valley

Who can end this

Five council members decide whether this contract continues. They meet twice a month in a room you can walk into, and any resident may speak for three minutes.

01The Council

The five members

Names, districts, and email addresses as published by the Town. One member is selected each year to serve as Mayor.

Write to all five at once

Opens your email app with every council address filled in and the short letter already written. Change it to sound like you.

Email the whole Council

Source: the Town's own Town Council page, checked 7 August 2026. If you find this out of date, tell us.

How they voted, 16 September 2025

Taken word for word from the Town's adopted minutes[31].

  • Merl AbelMoved itAye
  • Jim SchoolerSeconded itAye
  • Jeff DrozdChaired the meeting as MayorAye
  • Rick DenisonAsked whether it would help with illegal OHV useAye
  • Robert LombardoAbsent, excused — cast no voteAbsent

Read this fairly

Merl Abel was Mayor Pro Tem that night, not Mayor. Jeff Drozd chaired the meeting. Abel became Mayor later, and the Town rotates the office each year. Anyone saying "the Mayor pushed this through" has the facts wrong.

Robert Lombardo did not vote. He was absent and excused. He should not be described as having supported it.

And the vote itself was not unreasonable on its face. The Council attached a condition: a privacy policy, back for approval before the cameras went live. Four members voted for a safeguarded program and got the program without the safeguard[33]. Raise that with them. Enforcing their own condition is far easier for a council member than defending a vote.

02The meeting

When and where

Public comment is the highest-value action available to any resident.

When
1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month, at 5:00 p.m.
Where
The Yucca Room, Yucca Valley Community Center
57090 Twentynine Palms Highway (SR 62), Yucca Valley, CA 92284
Can't attend?
The Town streams Council meetings, and posts video to watch later. Check the meeting calendar for the link.

Source: Town of Yucca Valley. Meetings are sometimes cancelled, so check the meeting calendar before you drive over.

Before you drive over

Meetings here get cancelled often; seven of the last ten months had one. Check the agenda portal the day before, or you may drive to a locked room. The next scheduled meeting is Tuesday 18 August 2026.

To speak: fill in a "Request to Speak" form near the Town Clerk's desk and hand it over before the Council reaches your item. One form per item, three minutes each. To comment in writing instead, email townclerk@yucca-valley.org. The Town publishes no cutoff, so send it early.

Get the three-minute script

03The other levers

If it turns out to be a County matter

Yucca Valley has no police department of its own, so expect to hear that this is not entirely the Town's to decide.

The contract names the Town of Yucca Valley as the customer, so this Council can end it. The Sheriff's Department operates the system, is the billing contact on the order form, and filed the environmental notice for the installation as lead agency[38], so the deflection will come.

Do not let it end the conversation. The Town Council can do all of this on its own:

  1. Pass a resolution formally opposing the deployment and asking the County to terminate.
  2. Direct staff to obtain the usage policy, the audit, and the search logs, and bring them back in public.
  3. Adopt an ordinance requiring a public hearing before any surveillance system operates inside Town limits.

Pressure travels upward too. In Santa Clara County a board decision cascaded into Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View at once[25].

The other lever

Three of these seats are on the ballot on 3 November 2026 —District 1, District 3, District 5, held by Jim Schooler, Merl Abel, Rick Denison[41].

An election is the other thing a resident controls, and a council member who fixes this before November gets to run on having fixed it.

Official pages