Through a public records request, it was revealed that City of Yakima Councilwoman Soneya Lund has not turned on her city cell phone in weeks making her inaccessible to constituents.
This is interesting for a few reasons. The first interesting aspect that sticks out is a sitting councilmember thinks it is comical to limit access and communication between her and her constituents.
Councilwoman Lund, ironically, ran on increasing accessibility and communication to council members but her actions speak louder than her City biography. Councilwoman Lund has eliminated an avenue of communication. Have her priorities changed? Is she no longer interested in focusing her efforts on Council accessibility and communication?
Now, more than ever, citizens must have access to their elected representatives. Communication between said official and constituents is imperative as elected officials have a mandate to vote the will of their constituents.
In addition, how much taxpayer money is the city spending on Soneya Lund’s cell phone that she is not even utilizing? Although it is probably in the hundreds of dollars, a city council member has a fiduciary responsibility to eliminate any waste of taxpayer funds.
Councilwoman Lund has a history of negative events with phones when she lobbed an expletive at fellow Councilwoman Kay Funk in 2020.
Despite Soneya Lund’s tangled history with the use of phones, she owes it to her voters and all taxpayers to turn on her city phone, eliminate wasting tax payers money, and fulfill the promise her biography makes.
