Council receives racial profiling report

The Yoakum City Council received the 2023 racial profiling report from the Yoakum Police Department at the March 12 meeting.

The report showed that there was a total of 1,035 traffic stops. Of the 1,035 traffic stops, 461 individuals were Hispanic, 466 were white, 98 were black, and ten were Asian. 411 of those stops were female and 624 were male.

Council also approved the placement of a cell tower to be placed across from Block 2 next to 701 Front Street.

This is being built at the behest of AT&T and will also be able to accommodate Verizon and T Mobile. It will provide good indoor coverage all around that area.

There was also a request from the DeWittLavaca Special Education Cooperative to utilize city owned property for the placement of communication equipment. The cooperative received a grant from the Dickson-Allen Foundation for handheld walkie talkies. They want to put up a six-foot antenna on the tower.

“We’ve been working on our emergency management plan,” DeWitt Lavaca Special Education Cooperative Budget Manager Carri Dicke said. “In the event of an emergency, cell phones get bombarded, and you can’t get through. That’s why we’ve been looking at radios. We’ve been looking at the tower in the back (of the city owned property) to get something that would be high enough to pick up signal to broadcast across our campuses. We want to be able to pick up inside the buildings as well as in a 25-mile radius.”

The Cooperative is made up of nine school districts. It services every school district in Lavaca County.

Other items on the agenda included:

• The installation of fiber services through Rise Broadband to utilize the City of Yoakum’s right-ofway and poles was tabled.

• The Yoakum Heritage Museum requested additional funding from council. Council will provide up to $22,000 per year for them.