This page reconstructs the May 12, 2026 council meeting from the city’s own YouTube recording; every quote below is in the video at the linked timestamp, checkable by anyone. It settles what the press coverage couldn’t agree on, and it documents a vote taken so abruptly, amid so much chaos, that a council member had to announce into the microphone that it had happened at all.
A note on sourcing: quotes come from the video’s captions; the captions don’t label speakers, so attributions rely on meeting context (the chair runs votes; “Just a second, Kim” precedes exchanges with Roney) and attendee accounts. Anything uncertain is marked. The official minutes corroborate the outcome; see below.
The shape of the night
A six-hour, forty-three-minute meeting. The RTIC items, B1 (the $1.14M DOJ grant) and B2 (the 7.5-year Axon contract), shared the agenda with the entire FY26–27 budget presentation and a contested zoning case. Public comment on the RTIC didn’t begin until five hours and twenty minutes in.
It started with the consent agenda, and a warning (0:25:56)
The night’s first speaker, resident Ben Spencer, compared the city’s process for a one-mile sidewalk (a 2016 bond referendum, public input surveys in 2020 and 2022, a public information meeting in February) with its process for the surveillance package:
“If you go to the city council minutes archives… No results when you search Axon, no results if you search Fusus, no results if you search RTIC… On ashevillenc.gov, that’s zero results for Axon, zero results for Fusus, zero results for RTIC… Again, there’s just no information, not even a contract.”
The consent agenda then passed by voice vote in about ten seconds (0:29:32).
The city’s case (4:31–5:10)
Interim Chief Jackie Stepp presented solo for roughly forty minutes; residents at the meeting clocked it precisely: “The police chief was given from 9:47 to 10:26 to talk, but we get an hour. And also, there wasn’t an expert that presented on our side” (Canyon De Luca, 6:15:18). On the recording itself: “There’s no facial recognition, no general monitoring, no unrestricted access to private cameras” (4:33:18); “Axon neither has access to the Fusus or to the system, or retains data” (4:47:05); her values line at 4:34:29, “public safety should not come at the expense of community values”, and her closer, “trust will not be assumed. It will be demonstrated” (5:10:17). Deputy Chief Aardema’s companion promises (“We control Axon Fusus and we will not be sharing information with federal immigration,” “this is a reactive system, it’s not predictive police,” and residents’ fears being “real and valid”) come from WLOS’s reporting on the vote (published May 14; the remarks are not on the meeting recording, and I label the venue precisely for that reason). Every one of these is now a tracked promise: the immigration pledge against the national record of identical pledges failing on audit, “reactive not predictive” against Chief Lamb’s own “predictive policing” testimony, and the values line quoted back by the night’s final speaker (below). The Promise Tracker holds all of them, and the full claim-by-claim breakdown of the presentation lives at Jackie Stepp.
The motion was teed up before the public spoke (5:17:55)
After the staff presentation on B1/B2, a motion to adopt was made and seconded, before public comment opened. For the next hour, residents spoke against the package to a motion already pending, needing only the word “vote” to finish.
The hour the public got, and what they did with it
Twenty-three residents spoke; twenty-two opposed. That hour was not venting. It contained the complete argument against the system, now collected in full at The People Who Showed Up. The arc of it, from the video:
- The security consultant: Sarah Kent: “The Fourth Amendment binds local government, not Axon… We cannot claw back that data” (5:28:50, 5:31:11).
- The researcher with Axon’s own investor deck: Aaron Dahlstrom (125% net revenue retention, the city’s own 86% bodycam cost jump) submitted the deck itself as public comment; it’s in the city’s meeting folder (5:21:28).
- The contract attorney: Jessica Myers: “They’re not going to let you negotiate the master services agreement… You’re not going to be able to promise that the federal agencies are not going to have access to this” (6:02:17), and then read the existing Flock contract’s section 5.3 disclosure clause aloud: “you can drive a truck through this” (6:04:46).
- The technologist from the abortion-access space: Nicole Lopez: “Council should also be thinking of the federal government as a threat actor… The enforcement mechanism must have teeth” (5:55:21).
- The neighbor under the cameras: Wendell Wilson, who lives near Pisgah View: “It doesn’t make me feel safe to be tracked all the time. It makes me scared” (5:57:20), the lived version of everything on Watching the Poor.
- The transparency advocate: Patrick Conant: “we are removing citizen oversight and expanding surveillance. That is a dangerous combination… a 7-and-1/2-year, multi-million-dollar vendor commitment whose binding operational terms do not yet exist in reviewable form” (5:58:29).
- The mother and minister: Cassandra Howe: “What do all these cameras teach our children?… we start believing… that we’re to be feared” (5:54:05).
- The process question nobody answered: Ann Craig: “Since there is no deadline to accept this grant… what is the urgency here?” (5:43:38), a question staff had already conceded on April 28 (“Is there a deadline?” “There’s not”).
- The closer: Ben Spencer, thirty seconds, quoting the chief’s own presentation back to the dais: “public safety cannot come at the expense of community values” (6:18:50).
Constitutional analysis, vendor financials, contract language, lived experience, faith, and the city’s own words returned to it, in two-minute allotments, against a pending motion, after a six-hour wait. Council engaged with none of it before voting. The full collection, with every name and timestamp: The People Who Showed Up.
The vote nobody saw (6:20:37)
The final speaker finished at 6:20:31. Six seconds later, the chair:
“All right. We have a motion and a second for the B1—”
The room erupted (“SIX HOURS TO LISTEN TO EVERYONE SPEAK”), followed by applause and shouting. Somewhere in that uproar, off-microphone, the vote happened. It is not audible on the city’s own recording. What is audible, shouted into a microphone (6:21:19):
“IN CASE YOU DIDN’T NOTICE, THERE WAS JUST A VOTE.”
(Attendees identify the speaker as council member Kim Roney.) A second attendee’s account, published in Enlace Latino NC, corroborates it; resident Elizabeth Schell: “They voted while we were standing around asking them to let everyone speak.” Only then did the chair re-run the vote visibly (“So we— all those in favor raise your hand… Just a second, Kim. And— sorry, I’m trying to help the city clerk. Do you have it?”) and summarize (6:21:47):
“But, to summarize, the vote was 6 to 1 in favor of item B1.”
From the floor: “You didn’t let us speak."
"There’s still 21 people on the record” (6:22:56)
Residents asked to speak on B2: “Can we speak for another hour on B2?” The chair declined: “We gave notice ahead of time of how our public comment works.” Roney, from the dais:
“I know there’s still 21 people on the record.”
And then, beginning her presentation after the vote it addressed (6:23:10):
“I know that the vote already passed. But the public record is important… these conversations about surveillance and billionaire-owned tech have been coming up for the past 4 years, and it’s been pretty quiet in City Hall. Why now?… our authoritarian federal government has deployed armed federal agents to terrorize Americans across the country and violate Fourth Amendment rights. I’m hearing neighbors ask local elected officials to protect them.”
She read the ACLU of North Carolina’s warning letter into the record (6:25:05), a letter she had shared with all of her colleagues before the vote.
B2: twenty-five seconds (6:32:44)
After Roney’s presentation (“…why I had to vote no”), the second item, the 7.5-year Axon contract, went: motion, second, voice vote, done.
“Do I have a motion to adopt item B2?” … “Second.” … “All those in favor, please say I.” … “Any opposed?” … “Okay, the vote is 6 to 1.”
The official minutes confirm it
The City Clerk’s minutes record: all seven members present; Bo Hess moved and Maggie Ullman seconded both items; both “carried on a 6-1 vote, with Councilwoman Roney voting ‘no.‘” The minutes count 22 speakers in opposition during public comment. What was enacted: Resolution 26-97 (the civil-liberties resolution), Resolution 26-98 (grant acceptance), Ordinance 5222 (the $1,141,255.56 budget amendment), and Resolution 26-99, which authorized the City Manager to sign the Axon contract. The signed contract itself has still never been made public. All primary documents: Documents.
Read the minutes next to the video and notice what the official record smooths away: the minutes show a routine 6–1; the video shows a vote taken off-mic amid shouting that had to be announced to the room. Both are true. That’s why this archive keeps both. The minutes also record: 22 of 23 public speakers opposed; adjournment at 11:59 PM.
What the full document packet reveals
Deeper findings from the staff reports, presentations, and minutes (all linked at Documents):
- The contract was still being negotiated during the vote. City Attorney Branham told council his office “has been reviewing the terms with the software provider” and that Axon had “expressed willingness” to add provisions: present tense, at the meeting. Council authorized a 7.5-year commitment whose terms did not yet exist in final form. The staff report’s attachment list confirms: resolution only, no contract, no pricing exhibit.
- A promised committee review was skipped. APD’s own April 28 presentation timeline promised the Axon contract would go to the Public Safety Committee before council. It never did; the B.2 staff report lists Committees: “None.”
- The grant was accepted before its conditions were known. The staff report states DOJ award terms “will be set at the Federal level” and staff would review them after receipt to “determine the City’s ability and willingness to comply.”
- The letters, settled. DA Todd Williams’ letter (dated April 30) and US Attorney Russ Ferguson’s letter (dated May 12, the day of the vote) were excerpted aloud by Chief Stepp. And the NC Attorney General letter is real: Mayor Manheimer read Jeff Jackson’s letter into the record, a conditional endorsement hedged, in his own words, “Based on what APD has described.” The state’s top law-enforcement officer evaluated a description, not documents, because there were none to evaluate. None of the three letters appears in the public meeting packet.
- The numbers kept moving. Between April 28 and May 12, the video wall went from ~$400K to ~$500K, “brick and mortar” from ~$250K to ~$173K, and the funding coverage from “7 years” to “7.5” to “8” depending on the slide; the grant amount itself appears as three different figures across the staff report, minutes, and presentation.
What the record now establishes
- The vote count was 6–1 on both items, stated by the chair on the city’s own video and confirmed in the official minutes. Every member except Roney voted yes: Esther Manheimer, Antanette Mosley, Sheneika Smith, Maggie Ullman, Sage Turner, Bo Hess.
- The B1 vote was taken off-microphone amid shouting, seconds after comment closed, and had to be announced to the room afterward.
- 21 signed-up speakers were never heard, confirmed on the dais in the moment.
- The motion was pending before the public ever spoke.
- As of the night of the vote, the city’s own searchable records contained nothing: zero results for Axon, Fusus, or RTIC in the council minutes archive and on ashevillenc.gov, demonstrated on the record by a resident.
- Council’s engagement with the substance (the ACLU letter, the Flock contract’s disclosure loophole, the contract terms nobody had seen) happened, where it happened at all, after the vote.
- The opposition was not vague fear. In one hour the public delivered constitutional analysis, the vendor’s own investor financials, a reading of the operative contract language, and firsthand testimony from under the existing cameras; every argument this site has since documented at length was made to council’s face, before the vote, and is preserved verbatim at The People Who Showed Up.
Part of the Meetings series, built from the city’s full meeting-video archive: 102 meetings’ transcripts and counting. Companions: May 7: The Contract That Didn’t Exist · April 28: The Sales Pitch. See The People Who Showed Up · Timeline · Speak at Council · Promise Tracker