RECAP: Yucca Valley Town Council, June 2, 2026
Youth Commission recounts an eventful year, Council approves the Walmart fuel station and a two-year budget; residents push back on light pollution, the packet's size, and Flock cameras
Editor’s note: Welcome to our first meeting recap for Yucca Valley Town Council. The Desert Trumpet is taking the first steps toward expanding coverage of local government by covering Yucca Valley Town Council meetings. Yucca Valley residents deserve the kind of accessible civic reporting that empowers more effective engagement with their elected representatives.
Meeting recaps are assembled and reviewed by the Yucca Valley Resident Review Committee, a volunteer group of Yucca Valley residents with knowledge of local government and community affairs. A member of the committee was present at the meeting. Committee members are known to Desert Trumpet staff and to one another, but have chosen to remain anonymous due to concerns about retaliation. We respect that decision and are grateful for their participation.
This preview was produced with AI assistance, consistent with the approach described in our AI Policy. As noted there, we are exploring how AI-assisted summaries can allow us to extend coverage to governing bodies beyond the current scope of our budget for paid staff. We treat this as a bridge toward fuller coverage, not a substitute for it, and we are disclosing it explicitly here.
The Yucca Room was nearly full when the meeting opened — but most of the crowd had come for the warm-up act. Youth commissioners packed the front rows with their families, a six-year-old led the Pledge of Allegiance, and the room laughed out loud when Mayor Merl Abel read the title of the boy’s recycled-art piece: “I have too many of these.” By the time the Council got to the night’s actual weight — a 24-hour gas station and a roughly $23 million biennial budget — the room had thinned to fewer than a dozen. The feel-good civic ceremony drew the house; the big-money decisions played to a half-empty room.
That is not unusual, and it is not entirely the public’s fault. The June 2 agenda ran to twenty-nine items packed into a 2,762-page packet released the Friday before a holiday-shortened week — the consequence, in part, of a light meeting schedule for the spring: the Council cancelled both its April 21 and May 19 meetings, and the business piled into this one. (Between January and May, Yucca Valley cancelled three council meetings; Twentynine Palms, next door, cancelled none.) All five members were present: Abel, Mayor Pro Tem Jim Schooler, and Councilmembers Rick Denison, Jeff Drozd, and Robert Lombardo. Every vote of the night was unanimous. The meeting ran about two and a half hours.
Related documents:
Meeting agenda and meeting video
Our agenda preview
A note on order: the Council moved the Youth Commission report up ahead of the public hearings so the students wouldn’t have to wait and because the Walmart hearing was noticed for “at or after 6 p.m.,” it took two later department reports first. This recap follows the meeting as it happened.
An invocation, and a fight that hasn’t gone away
The meeting opened, as town meetings do, with an invocation, this one from Anne Fernandez of the Yucca Valley Center for Spiritual Living, a pointedly non-evangelical choice, and a small story in itself. 1
The backstory: on November 4, Pastor Daniel Hanna of Crossview Bible Church gave an invocation that ranged well past the ceremonial. These are excerpts:
Now we bring before your throne and into your nurturing, shepherding care our concerns for the most innocent and most defenseless among us, the unborn children in the womb, and we pray that you would restrain the evil that would seek to destroy their lives even before they take their first breath in this world….
…and we pray for our children and teens and for their teachers. I pray that our kids in California schools shall not be captured by deceitful evil philosophies of man
we pray your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we pray especially that evil will be restrained here this night and throughout our nation, bring back peaceful, lawful discussion to the land of the free and the home of the brave. We pray that tonight’s community dialog here will be peaceful and respectful, and that you shall be glorified this night and every night until Jesus comes back riding in on the clouds. Amen.
The First Amendment leaves the council and the clerk no room to review an invocation’s content beforehand — censoring a private speaker at the podium would violate the speaker’s free-speech rights — so the town’s 2013 resolution acknowledges this directly and can only ask, not require, that speakers not proselytize or disparage other faiths. Individual invocations aren’t the council’s legal responsibility; a pattern of exploiting the podium to proselytize or denigrate is, under the Establishment Clause — and the November 4 and March 3 invocations together raise that question. In the months since, the council has mostly sidestepped it, with no invocation at all on several nights and Mayor Abel delivering it himself on others.
The November 4 blowback prompted Yucca Valley resident Janice Taitel to launch a petition — initially calling for non-denominational invocations, then revised, after further research, to call for inclusive invocations that aren’t necessarily non-sectarian. The revised petition drew 210 signatures. Taitel presented it to the Council at the December 2, 2025 meeting during public comment and has since repeatedly asked that a policy discussion be placed on the agenda. The town reviewed the policy and found it legal. It has not held a public discussion. “Everything we do must be legal,” Taitel wrote to the Desert Trumpet on Facebook2, “but not everything that is legal must be done. YV residents should have a say in this.”
However, as recently as March, shortly after the start of the Iran war, Logan Smit of the Calvery Bible Institute prayed:
…Lord, I pray for our troops as they take on the forces of evil in this world. I pray for President Trump and his war council as he handles this situation. Be with us all in the holy and mighty name of Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Amen.
A Councilmember can be heard remarking, “Well done Logan” and the Mayor says, “Thank you Logan, we appreciate it.” Oddly, this invocation is present on the documentation posted to the videographer’s YouTube channel, but is missing from the official video posted to the Town website, which starts with the first agenda item.
Against that run, handing the June 2 invocation to the Yucca Valley Center for Spiritual Living reads less like routine scheduling than an attempt to quell the protest. However, the policy itself has not been revised.
New faces, and a shelter still climbing out of a hole
Public Works introduced Brenda Northup, a new administrative assistant who most recently served as town clerk for a small town in Nevada and is relocating to Yucca Valley with her family. Then Deputy Town Manager Shane Stueckle brought up three new animal-shelter hires — Wesley McDavid, Daren Bradstock, and Sierra Crippen, the last newly promoted to a full-time animal-control officer.
The new hires carry a backstory worth remembering, because it is the reason a routine personnel item matters. Through much of 2025, the shelter was the most contentious subject in town. Residents began turning out at meetings in January over allegations of improper euthanasia practices by Doug Smith, the shelter's longtime Animal Care and Control Manager, who retired in July3 following months of sustained public pressure. According to town staff data presented to the Council in April 2025, roughly 513 of the 969 dogs admitted to the shelter in 2024 — about 53 percent — were euthanized rather than adopted or returned to their owners4. The case of "Howdy," a severely neglected dog pulled off the euthanasia list and rushed into emergency surgery, became the emblem of the controversy.5
The town launched a 90-day operational review in March 2025; the final review was filed July 15, and a standing shelter committee was established, chaired by Councilmembers Schooler and Drozd. So when Deputy Town Manager Stueckle reported that the dog live-release rate now sits "just a hair below 90 percent," he was describing a turnaround, not a routine statistic, and the Council knew it.
The Youth Commission steals the show
If the crowd came for anything, it was this. Recreation Supervisor Clayton Rardon introduced Chair Acacia Smith, a 17-year-old Yucca Valley High senior in her fifth year on the commission, and Vice Chair George Wingerter, 17, a junior at the iLEAD Exploration charter school. The two walked through a year that included a Valentine’s dance with the senior center, a Kids Zone at the health fair, food-donation drives, and a return to the Grubstake Days parade, plus a middle-school recruitment forum whose pudding-eating contest got its own laugh from the room. Smith noted the commission has swelled from twenty a couple years ago to nearly forty members.
The Council ate it up. Councilmember Lombardo praised the students’ public-speaking poise as proof staff were doing their jobs well; Mayor Pro Tem Schooler, who was on town staff when the commission was created some three decades ago, marveled at how far it had come. The meeting paused for several minutes so council members could come down off the dais for photos. Then the families filed out, and the room got quiet.
Consent Agenda: a lot of money, one vote, no questions
Town Clerk Brooke Dudra reported no speaker cards and no member pulled anything, so Items 3 through 21 passed in a single motion. That is ordinary procedure; what rode along on it was not. The same vote ratified:
more than $3.4 million in April warrants
a $7.4 million one-year amendment to the county Sheriff’s contract — the town’s largest recurring expense, up more than half a million over the prior year
a master fee-schedule update that stacks a 5.5 percent inflation bump on previously adopted increases
the call for the November election for Council districts 1, 3 and 5
$460,000 in community contracts
a new $60,000 town truck paired with a $150,000 transfer out of capital reserves
None of it drew a word of discussion.
Three of those items — the Sheriff’s contract, the community contracts, and the election call — describe their cost as already “accommodated” in the “Adopted FY2026-27 Budget.” That budget was Item 28, still hours away from adoption. As our preview noted, the spending was approved before the document authorizing it was on the books.
Two public hearings, no public
The annual assessment levies (Item 22) and the solid-waste charges going onto the property tax roll (Item 23) are yearly housekeeping, and both passed without a single resident at the microphone, despite these being rare moments to question a charge before it lands on a tax bill. Worth knowing anyway: solid-waste rates are rising about 9 percent, roughly $3 a month for a typical household, driven by a Consumer Price Index (CPI) adjustment and the cost of state-mandated organic-waste diversion. (Composting runs more than twice the per-ton cost of the landfill.)
Fireworks, take two
Last Fourth of July, Yucca Valley’s fireworks fizzled. Per a report at Z107.7, the pyrotechnics vendor, PyroSpectaculars of Rialto, experienced staffing shortages and the 9 p.m. show launched late (11 p.m.) and short (7 minutes instead of 20).6 Recreation Supervisor Rardon presented a plan: PyroSpectaculars has handed over a $40,000 credit tentatively to be used at the new aquatics center’s grand opening, and this year’s July 3 show at the high school will be split fifty-fifty with the Town paying $22,500 and the Twentynine Palms Band of Mission Indians paying $22,500 and supplying an experienced pyrotechnician. A crew that usually works the stage at Pappy & Harriet’s is handling sound.
A cyclist makes the case for bikes
Item 27, the town’s renewed roughly $8.7 million Active Transportation Program grant application for sidewalks and ADA ramps near four schools and along Barron Drive, drew the evening’s first public commenter. Eric Linnert spoke for a fledgling group called the Basin Bike Path. The group formed, he said, after a cyclist was killed in town last fall, and it recently drew about thirty riders to its first community ride. He urged the town to weight future projects toward connecting destinations by bike:
I was surprised to learn that only a relatively small portion of this proposal is dedicated to bicycle infrastructure, while the majority is directed towards new sidewalk construction. However, I would encourage the town to carefully evaluate whether every proposed sidewalk segment provides the same public benefit as additional bicycle and multi-use path investments. One of the recurring themes I’ve heard at the California Bicycle Summit was that communities are increasingly looking for projects that connect destinations rather than simply adding isolated pieces of infrastructure. Bicycle and multi-use paths can often serve a broader range of users while helping achieve safety, recreation, tourism, and transportation goals simultaneously. The town identified already many of these goals in the Parks and Recreation Master Plan adopted in 2019 yet several bicycle-related recommendations remain unimplemented.
Councilmember Denison, who chairs the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority, gave a long defense of the school-centered design. The point, he said, is to pull traffic off congested streets and stitch together sidewalk gaps, and he explained how local Measure I and Measure Y dollars seed the larger grant. Mayor Abel conceded the town has “missed a couple opportunities” to add bike striping during repaving and pointed Linnert toward staff. The grant application passed 5-0; the town expects to hear back on the grant in November.
The main event: a 24-hour fuel station, and the dark-sky fight
The Walmart fuel station (Item 24) is the largest single item in the packet by far, and it has history. The original Yucca Valley Retail Specific Plan was approved on a 2008 environmental review; the fuel station was studied then but dropped and never built, the store opened in 2014, and Walmart has been back before the Council for exterior and signage changes more than once since. Now it wants six pumps, twelve dispensers, a 4,950-square-foot canopy, and a convenience store on the lot’s northeast corner. The store would keep the same hours as Walmart’s and the pumps would run around the clock.
Jared Jerome, Senior Planner from the Yucca Valley Planning Department, walked through three actions: an addendum to that 2008 review rather than a fresh study, the conditional-use permit, and the specific-plan amendment. The amendment lowers the site’s required parking, a detail our preview flagged and one that no one on the dais raised.
What residents did raise was light. Every speaker came back to the night sky.
Dean Arvidson, a Yucca Valley resident and board member of the Sky’s the Limit observatory in Twentynine Palms, read a statement prepared by a fellow board member, an electrical engineer. He called the timeline hurried, said the photometric and lighting plans carried no firm due dates, and argued the 2008 review never seriously analyzed lighting’s effect on wildlife or migratory birds.
Deb Douglas, a long-time basin resident now in Joshua Tree, spoke to what dark skies mean to people who live under them:
One of the things I remembered about being here when I first moved here is that there’s a bunch of people having big telescopes, and they go out to the Joshua Tree National Park, and they are so generous with those telescopes, and I was just captivated when they showed me what was up in the sky. I saw Saturn’s rings. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it blew me away. So, it’s really important to me, and I think a lot of our citizens, to keep those dark skies, and I applaud that there is some regulation here. When I’ve talked to other lighting specialists, they talk not only about 2700 kelvin, but also about shielding, so it’s low.
Susan Wells of Joshua Tree asked why no new environmental review, when the station sits in a different spot than the 2008 plan and would put fumes near homes across the street? A written comment from Donald Nordine was entered into the record without comment as to its contents.
Town Manager Stueckle said the project is conditioned to meet the town’s lighting ordinance and that the applicant agreed to go beyond it at the Planning Commission’s request; that county standards don’t apply inside town; and that state law does not require a new review when an addendum will do. He noted the town is already preparing to bring revised lighting standards to the Planning Commission around August, with night-sky advocates invited, which addresses residents’ long-running complaints about light pollution. Jerome added that the final lighting plan must be approved before any building permits are issued.
Mayor Abel asked whether the pumps would snarl the shared entrances and bus stops and about glare from the elevated pad onto Highway 62; staff said there would be no permanent change to traffic flow and that light would be held to the property line. The three actions passed 5-0, 5-0, and 5-0.
The budget, and the document no one could read
Finance Manager Jordan Gumbish, joining remotely, laid out a 2027-2028 General Fund budget balanced in both years with about $22.9 million in revenue against $22.5 million in spending for the coming year, a surplus near $436,000 and reserves held around 60 percent. The budget folds in a five-year county shelter contract and a cost-of-living raise for staff.
It also rests, as it has all along, on a “council-approved strategic plan.” Gumbish told the Council the plan was approved in February and indeed the minutes from the February 3 meeting indicate that it was. The trouble, as our preview detailed, is that this very packet includes a plan draft labeled “Final Review” with areas highlighted as though under consideration.
The lone budget commenter, Pauline “Polly” Pisano, went straight at the process. Then she turned to Flock, the automated license-plate-reader cameras the town began pursuing in spring 2025. Pisano said she had gathered more than 300 signatures and listed cities that have cancelled their Flock contracts, asking the Council not to fund the system and to be transparent about it in the budget.
It is deeply urgent that Yucca Valley cancels its contract and stops funding these Flock surveillance cameras as a waste of our city’s funds, which should be put towards community towards programs of community uplift. Dr. King once said the prescription for the cure rests with the accurate diagnosis of the disease. I’m standing here today as a granddaughter of a lieutenant from the Boston Police Force, who served 30 years of his life, and he would agree that meeting basic needs—food, housing, and education—is what makes communities safe, not faulty, hackable tech. Yucca Valley is our home. Let’s make sure it continues to be a welcoming community.
Flock cameras are a basin-wide flashpoint: Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms run them through the same San Bernardino County Sheriff’s operator and the same vendor, though each town votes on their contracts separately, and Pisano has carried the same message to both councils.
The Council’s discussion that followed never touched the Flock question; it turned instead to whether reserves could cover surprises at the coming aquatics center. The budget passed 5-0.
The rest of the night
The Council adopted a state-mandated policy (Item 29) for handling internet or phone outages during hybrid meetings. It passed 5-0.
Under future agenda items, Mayor Pro Tem Schooler asked for a full shelter report to the whole Council, ideally June 16, and previewed numbers from the May subcommittee meeting he and Drozd sit on: April live-release rates of 86.9 percent for dogs and 100 percent for cats, a successful dollar-a-day May adoption promotion, and a volunteer program now running. Abel noted the night-sky standards heading back to the Planning Commission.
In general public comment, Bonnie Hawthorne called in by Zoom to return to the gas station, warning that the Walmart entrance is “a bottleneck on a good day” and that an elevated, 24-hour station would be visible for miles.
Staff and council comments closed the night on a note of remembrance. Sheriff’s Captain Steven Scovel reported that more than a hundred people had gathered the Sunday before for the five-year memorial of Sergeant Dominic Vaca, killed in the line of duty on Memorial Day weekend in 2021 and honored by the Council every May since. Mayor Abel, after wishing birthdays to Councilmember Denison and Mayor Pro Tem Schooler, who had spent theirs at the dais, closed the meeting in Vaca’s honor, asking the room to keep his widow, Valerie Vaca, in their thoughts. The next regular meeting is June 16.
Run for Town Council! Districts 1 (Schooler), 3 (Abel) and 5 (Denison) are up for election. The nomination period for candidates begins July 13, 2026 and ends on August 6, 2026. Contact Town Clerk Brooke Dudra for details and check out our article on How to Run for City and Town Council for general guidelines.
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The invocation section was substantially revised after receiving new information from Yucca Valley resident Janice Taitel on June 6, a few hours after publication. Two paragraphs were deleted and replaced with a more accurate and complete discussion — those new paragraphs begin “The First Amendment leaves…” and “The Novemeber 4 blowback…”
After reading Ms. Taitel’s comment on Facebook, we asked if she would add it to the article comments, and it can be read below.
KESQ News Channel 3, July 23, 2025 (reporter Luis Avila).
Dog euthanasia rate and raw figures: town staff data, April 1, 2025 Council meeting. Full operational review documents available at yucca-valley.org/our-town/departments/community-development/animal-control/operational-review
Moore,Stacy, Dog’s condition kindles more outrage, Hi Desert Star, Jul 1, 2025, Updated Jul 16, 2025
Wells, Adeline, Yucca Valley July 4th fireworks fail to launch, Z107.7, July 7, 2025
Thank you Cindy for this important coverage. That the town provided review of the volume of materials only 4 days before the meeting and passed significant, substantive agenda items using the consent calendar is horrifying. The planning commission will be revisiting the night sky requirements in August. The question is will they actually invite the public to the meeting?
Thank you covering the invocation issue. I have two corrections: First, you state that the YV town council policy "bars the council and the clerk from reviewing an invocation’s content beforehand." It does, but that is because such review is unconstitutional as it steps on the invocators' First Amendment rights. The invocators are advised, "you are free to offer the invocation according to the dictates of your own conscience. To maintain the spirit of respect and ecumenism, the Town Council requests only that the prayer opportunity not be exploited as an effort to convert others to the particular faith of the invocational speaker, nor to disparage any faith or belief different than that of the invocational speaker." The First Amendment protects the free speech of individuals by limiting the government's power to control it. At the same time, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment forbids the government, including local government, from favoring any one religion, so these two factors are at odds when it comes to these invocations. The council is not responsible for the content of an individual invocation, but it is unconstitutional and the town is liable if there is a pattern of exploiting the opportunity to proselytize or denigrate, which there has been. My second correction is that while I did launch a petition asking for non-denominational invocations immediately after the horrendous Nov 4 invocation, I then did more research and learned that sectarian invocations are legal as long as they are implemented without discrimination or exploiting the opportunity to proselytize or denigrate (which is difficult to enforce). I then launched a revised petition asking for inclusive (but not necessarily non-sectarian) invocations. This petition received 210 signatures. (Thank you for including the link in your article.) I presented it to the Town Council during Public Comments at the December 2 meeting. I have repeatedly asked that a discussion of the invocation policy be put on the agenda, but this hasn't happened. I received notice that they reviewed the policy and found it legal, but that is not a public discussion. Everything we do must be legal, but not everything that is legal must be done. YV residents should have a say in this.