The Kenai City Council had fallen victim once again to a Zoom bombing incident at its meeting on Wednesday, February 8th.
During the public comment period of the city council meeting, an individual by the pseudonym of Jim Connolly referred to a previous presentation about Project Homeless Connect statistics that were shown during scheduled public comments.
“She had a statistic that 15% of the cause of homelessness is lack of employment, and I’d just like to reiterate that the really good reason why we shouldn’t let any illegal aliens in is to steal jobs and be a burden on the community,” said “Connolly.”
Following his remark, a Zoom individual who used a fake racial slur name claimed to agree with the previous speaker and then started to share his opinion while using vulgar language.
“I agree with that last caller about, you know, letting all these, you know, b****** and n****** into our country,” said the caller.
Mayor Brian Gabriel asked the speaker to please refrain from using racial slurs.
The individual, however, felt that it was unfair to him, and proceeded to question his authority.
“It’s called free speech. You got it? You have to listen. You know, where in the First Amendment does it say that I can’t use racial slurs? **** you. **** you. ****. Gas them all,” said the caller.
The caller then proceeded to use the explicit word eighteen more times, before he was cut off from the Zoom.
A few more negative comments towards Jews were made by a previous caller before Zoom was shut off. Mayor Gabriel then called for a 10-minute brief to decompress after the situation.
This was the first “Zoom bombing incident” that took place in 2024. Zoom bombing is a term that refers to any unwanted disruptions of Zoom meetings, The Majority of the time, this is done by hackers and is done as a form of typically, verbal harassment.
Since Wednesday night’s incident, Kenai City Councilmember Alex Douthit has been interested in further assessing the situation, in an attempt to resolve the issue. Douthit says that Council member Phil Daniel has some experience in IT technology, as he has worked in IT in the past.
“He’s [Phil Daniel] going to try to meet up with the clerk and maybe the city’s IT department head guy there, and they’re going to try to come up with some ideas to strengthen and make sure all the settings are correct and make sure all everything is utilized for security measures on that. So that’s kind of his deal there. He’s going to look into it. That’s his specialty. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there last night but once it gets. Back in he’s gonna start working on that and just make sure all the security protocol that we have been set up and to see if there are ways to help secure it better,” said Douthit.
Douthit hopes that there can be some potential resolutions come the next meeting, which is set for February 21st.
The last incident took place on October 19th, 2023, when a similar incident referring to the Hamas-Israeli war and 9/11 was the topic of harassment.
Since the Oct. 19th incident, the Kenai City Council held a meeting in December of 2023 to determine whether they should continue using Zoom or terminate their subscription.
Within that meeting, various council members voiced their opinions on whether they should continue using Zoom.
In the December 2023 city council meeting, City Clerk Shellie Saner informed the council that she upgraded the city’s Zoom subscription to a webinar version that makes it “much more difficult” for Zoom-bomb incidents to occur. The city pays about $3,000 annually, she said, for the upgraded service.
Vice Mayor Henry Knackstedt opened the discussion by saying in-person comments, as well as written comments, are extremely valuable to him. But sometimes Zoom can be rather “distracting” for council members.
“I do support continuing with Zoom or some other platform that the clerk might come up with that provides for council when we can’t be here for a contractor, for example, a Commission member or something like that. But that kind of limits the public use there. But we do have YouTube which. Most of them appears to just be watching anyway that are there and that is a very good mode to do that is through YouTube. So, I would be inclined to drop the public participation part,” said Knackstedt.
Council member Phil Daniel believes that having Zoom as “another tool in the toolbox for public participation is important.”
“We should be able to offer as many opportunities as possible for people to participate if they want to. Being a body here, we are open to the public and some people may not want to make the journey. As you can see, the hot-button items are the ones that people will participate in. They live here they may be snowbirds we don’t know, and I feel like it’d be a disservice of us as a council to take that opportunity away for people that may not be able to come in and give their testimony,” said Daniel.
However, Councilmember James Baisden reminded everyone that Zoom meetings were only started because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. And while he does acknowledge that the use of Zoom could be useful, he would much rather see individuals coming in person to these community meetings.
“You should be in this, in this chamber right here if you want to have comments. This elected body just means more to me,” said Baisden.
At the end of the December meeting, the council decided that they would continue the use of Zoom. This would be the fourth time they opted for this decision.
The next Kenai City Council meeting is set for Wednesday, February 21st at 6:00 p.m. where the matter is expected to be discussed further.