Gene Yeakley blasted members of the Ceres City Council last week for remaining silent on May 9 while a number of his neighbors publicly accused him of harassing them when he complained about code violations.

Yeakley stood up at the May 23 council meeting to say the council should have stopped some of the speakers who called him out for reporting loud parties and music, squawking birds and other disturbances.

“It was uncalled for,” said Yeakley, who suggested they violated the posted rules of decorum at council meetings, which includes a ban on “rude or derogatory remarks.”

“Many of the things that those people said were not true,” Yeakley told the council, “and the things I did,  weren’t against the law.”

“I would have expected something from Mike Kline – he’s been around for a long time and he knows when something’s not right. Maybe the rest of you don’t, but he does and I expected something from him but I never heard anything. So to let these people degrade me and not be able to get probably an hour to explain all these things they accused me of … because, believe me, for each one of those things they accuse me of there was an answer. But they never come up front and said they did something wrong, did they?”

The Vietnam veteran said that for 33 years he has been subjected to “constant bombardment from some of these bigoted neighbors with what they want to do and infringe on my right.”

He urged other Ceres residents to report code violations and “just assume that those people who voted on are going to take care of every whim that you have that you think is going to be fixed.”

When Yeakley was done he was thanked by Mayor Javier Lopez but the council did not offer any remarks.

Yeakley unsuccessfully ran for Ceres City Council in 2015 and 2018.