An unauthorized user gained control of a Zoom whiteboard feature during the Red Oak City Council’s regular meeting on Monday, August 3, briefly displaying inappropriate cartoon images before city staff shut down the remote feed.
City Administrator Lisa Kotter confirmed the incident in a conversation this week, describing how City Clerk Carrie Shalters, who manages the electronic aspects of the meeting, noticed something was wrong and began working quickly to stop it.
What Happened
During the meeting, someone logged into the public Zoom session and activated the whiteboard tool. Three cartoon-style images that Kotter characterized as “weird cartoon pictures of inappropriate images” appeared on the shared screen. The images were not photographs of real people.
Staff immediately ended the Zoom portion of the meeting so that remote viewers could no longer see or hear the proceedings. The in-person meeting continued.
“We shut down the meeting,” Kotter said of the Zoom connection. “Anybody that was on Zoom was no longer able to hear or see what was happening.”
Response and Lessons Learned
Kotter said the city already had one earlier incident in which an unmuted participant yelled obscenities. In that case, staff used Zoom’s force-mute controls. The whiteboard episode presented a different challenge because the feature is less commonly used and was not immediately familiar to staff.
“You learn, as something like this happens, what are the measures that you can take to do better at not allowing people to do that,” Kotter said. City Clerk Carrie Shalters has been researching how to restrict or disable the whiteboard function for public meetings.
Kotter noted that this was only the second such disruption in the roughly two years she has served as city administrator — across approximately 48 regular council meetings. She described the percentage as very small.
Commitment to Transparency
Despite the disruption, Kotter made clear the city does not plan to abandon live remote access. She emphasized that Red Oak has worked hard to make meetings easy to follow, including posting the Zoom link, YouTube recordings, and full agenda packets online.
Going forward, the city intends to reduce casual, drive-by access while still serving residents and media who want to watch live. One likely change is to stop placing the Zoom link directly in easy-to-click Facebook posts. Instead, the link will remain available in the official agenda packet posted on the city website, requiring a deliberate extra step to join.
“I think that extra step of effort probably tries to wean off some of the people that are not getting on there,” Kotter said. “If you’re intentional… then that’s a little extra effort.”
She also said staff are exploring a waiting-room or admission-request process so that hosts must approve each participant before they can enter the meeting. That delay, she noted, would make it less attractive for someone simply looking to cause a brief disruption.
Broader View
Kotter framed the episode as an occasional cost of remaining open rather than a reason to close the doors. She compared it to other organizations that experience hacks or disruptions yet continue using the underlying technology after making improvements.
“There’s always opportunities for people to do things that try to stymie efforts from organizations like ours to be transparent,” she said. “I think we want to err on the side of not getting too extreme that we shut things down and become less transparent because of an occasional random person that made a bad choice. … The world didn’t come to an end. A couple people saw a cartoon image of something dumb, and we move on, do better.”
She stressed that legitimate public comment almost always happens in person and that remote viewing remains valuable for residents, media, and others who cannot attend every meeting live.
City officials say they will continue refining Zoom settings and access methods so that Red Oak’s meetings stay both open and orderly.
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