Five days before the May 12 vote, council held its agenda briefing: no public comment permitted, Mayor Manheimer and Councilmember Ullman absent, Interim Chief Stepp joining by phone. The city’s video records three things that should have each been a headline. Captions don’t label speakers (and garble names freely); attributions follow meeting context.
”That does not exist yet” (35:12)
Kim Roney opened the thread with the obvious problem (34:05): “the Axon contract doesn’t read like a purchase agreement… I realize that in the past we’ve talked about how we don’t have a contract with Axon, but surely we have some sort of data sharing agreements.” City Manager D.K. Wesley’s answer is the record’s cornerstone:
“What we’re looking to do in B2 is work through a negotiated comprehensive one agreement with Axon for all of those different components. So that does not exist yet… That hasn’t been finalized and has not been executed. B2 will give me authorization to further negotiate and finalize that contract with Axon.”
City Attorney Branham then confirmed what the paper trail actually was (35:53): “we have utilized what’s called purchase orders… in terms of any additional agreements, there are none. The additional agreements are essentially purchase orders, which don’t further define terms.” Years of Axon equipment, running on Sourcewell pass-throughs and purchase orders defining nothing.
So the May 12 vote authorized the city manager to sign a contract that had not been written. Council could not have read the final terms; neither could the public. When the “we own the data” claims were made, the paper that would decide ownership didn’t exist.
And the paper that did exist was hidden in plain sight. Roney noted a colleague had already had to share one of the contracts with the public themselves, and asked how a resident would even find them (37:00). Answer: buried under “final agenda documents” from the April 28 meeting, a location so obscure that Sage Turner responded, “Yeah, I don’t think I knew that either.” (40:39) Sitting councilmembers, five days out, learning where the operative documents were.
The “one camera” plan, explained by its supporters (38:10)
This meeting is where the Flock “wind-down” got its only real public examination, and its supporters explained my case for me. Roney surfaced the plan and rejected it: “I understood that we were headed in the direction of moving away, but maybe keeping one so that we have access to the network… I think even having one of them isn’t good for our community… I just want us to have an answer around timelines.” (No timeline was ever given.)
Stepp gave the rationale (38:48): “we do intend to continue having access to the Flock system. There’s so many agencies here locally that utilize that system… it’s just imperative… to be able to retain access to the system.” Turner then restated it with perfect clarity (41:49):
“What I think I heard you say, Chief, is that really keeping one just means that we have some kind of access to the interface so that we can use those that are out there that aren’t even our cameras… and therefore we have this somewhat relationship.”
Stepp: “Yeah, that’s kind of right. That exactly right.”
The chief and a councilmember confirmed it jointly: the point of keeping one camera is keeping the account. And Bo Hess, arguing for the plan, added the expiration logic (43:23): “even if Asheville got rid of every single Flock camera in Asheville, there would still be Flock cameras that you would be in contact with all over Western North Carolina… until Axon has the type of database that we can access like Flock, keeping that one Flock camera is a strategic public safety move.” His condition means Flock exits only when Axon replicates the network: the vendor changes; the surveillance doesn’t end. The full mechanics and the four-part motion that actually ends it: Getting Flock Out.
For the ledger, the counts as stated here (44:41): the city owns 11 Flock cameras, the county 22, and there are “many, many more in the city of Asheville” privately owned, yet the same briefing called access to everyone else’s cameras “imperative,” and fourteen months earlier the figure offered was 177,000.
A civil-liberties resolution, assembled in five days (46:16)
This briefing is also the origin of the “civil liberties resolution” that would pass alongside the RTIC on May 12. Hess asked to add a same-day companion “affirming our values to privacy, civil liberties, not using facial technology, and not using AI,” to be drafted by the city attorney, “hoping that we could pass these at the same time.” The document later cited as proof of careful safeguards was a political companion piece, requested five days before the vote, drafted in the same window, with no enforcement mechanism, no reporting duty, and no penalties. (Oversight Theater has the longer history of that move.)
A note on sourcing: quotes are cleaned from the city’s unlabeled auto-captions; speaker attributions are contextual. Timestamps link to the moment so you can verify every word.
Related: 2026-05-12 City Council · 2026-04-28 Work Session · Getting Flock Out · Their Claims vs The Record · Timeline · Bo Hess