Zoom-bombers target Hillsboro council meeting
Staff writer
A banal meeting quickly turned boisterous when Zoom-bombers descended on the online stream of a Hillsboro city council meeting Tuesday afternoon.
The intruders played loud noises to disrupt proceedings before city administrator Matt Stiles kicked the culprits off.
“If we continue getting these interruptions, we will turn off the Zoom call,” Mayor Lou Thurston said.
After Cole Collard finished presenting a financial software proposal from BS&A Software, it happened again.
A man named “John” joined the call. After a few seconds, his screen was replaced with a photo displaying pornographic material, Chinese and Russian flags, the URL to a website, and the Adidas logo.
Stiles again booted the perpetrator.
“We are getting cyberattacked via Zoom,” Thurston said.
The online call continued despite the mayor’s previous threats. No other Zoom-bombings took place for the rest of the meeting.
Stiles was unsure why the interruptions had taken place.
“That’s the first time we’ve ever had that stuff,” he said.
In terms of actual city news, Hillsboro agreed to act as “responsible entity” overseeing renovation of the Mary J. Regier Building at Tabor College.
Because the Department of Housing and Urban Development is providing a third of the project’s funding, a “responsible entity” is required to conduct an environmental review before renovations begin.
The building’s location in the middle of town may exempt it from a review.
“That’s usually what happens with an existing building that doesn’t have any known contamination issues,” Stiles said.
The renovation will further Tabor’s push to develop student entrepreneurs. The building will become “a modern business studies and entrepreneurship center,” per the council’s memorandum of understanding.
Additions will include an elevator, classrooms, conference rooms, and “a startup incubator.”
Tabor president David Janzen said the university would break ground on the project April 30.
“We’ve raised $8 of $11 million,” he said. “We’re well on our way.”
To conclude the meeting, Thurston read aloud a LinkedIn post written by Brooks Williams, a city manager in Texas.
The post is an aggressive defense of local government, arguing that local officials were far different from inefficient, shadowy federal bureaucrats, and should not be subject to the same criticisms.
Some passages implied that the federal government was dishonest was its spending.
“[Local government] doesn’t hide billions in black-box budgets or create ‘secret programs’ to funnel money into pet projects,” the post states. “Local government doesn’t have the luxury of inefficiency. We don’t get to stall for years, throw money at pet projects, and ‘study the issue’ until it disappears into the next election cycle.”
Stiles acknowledged the animated nature of the post, though he defended its reading.
“There’s probably more opportunity for efficiency at that level than there is here,” he said. “I think that’s what they’re getting at.”