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Downtown Wenatchee has a new billboard.
In response to the city choosing to raise family month banners sponsored by a local Turning Point USA chapter instead of Pride flags, Pride group OUT NCW has installed a year-round Pride billboard in downtown Wenatchee.
“We’re responding to the needs of our community as best we can by providing visibility, by providing support,” said OUT NCW President AJ Soto. “We’re here for the duration.”
The billboard, located in downtown Wenatchee, is adorned with pride flags and says “you are loved” several times.
In addition, another billboard reading “Love thy neighbor” just went up in East Wenatchee.
“There are a ton of people who see what we're doing and recognize that the message of, ‘love your neighbor,’ and ‘you are loved’ transcends a lot of ideology,” Soto said. “That's why we picked those messages. We want for them to be universal.”
The billboards were partly paid for by donations from the community in Wenatchee. That community helped pick the messages and designs going on the billboards.
“The reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “It truly is a community effort.”
Soto says it is that kind of positive engagement that will protect the billboards from vandals.
“We’ve discussed that it was a possibility and it's one of those things like anything could happen, but I don't think that we're overly concerned about it,” he said. “I'm really impressed by the incredible amount of love that we've gotten from the community.”
The two billboards are paid to be up for the next 12 months, with the intention to pay for them to go up beyond that. Meanwhile, Soto is looking at putting up more, smaller billboards around town.
“We are looking at acquiring small ones, depending on what's available,” he said.
Billboards in response to new banner policy
The billboards were initially conceived as a way to respond to the city of East Wenatchee banning hanging banners on streetlights not a part of an approved list. Pride flags were excluded from that list.
“We actually purchased the East Wenatchee billboard first,” Soto said. “That was in an attempt to help the community make their voice heard about their feelings about that decision.”
That changed when Soto heard about Wenatchee’s decision to fly “Family Month” banners in June instead of the Pride flags that had flown the past five years. He decided it would be best to raise two billboards, one in East Wenatchee and another in Wenatchee.
The family month banners in Wenatchee are set to replace the Pride flags that typically flew during June. Family month runs from Mother’s Day in early May to Father’s Day in late June. The family month banners in Wenatchee will fly from June 1 to June 30.
The red, white and blue banners say “freedom” and “America’s Family Month.”
The banners are sponsored by the local Turning Point USA chapter at the unaccredited school Vector College, which is operated by Grace City Church.
Turning Point USA is the brainchild of conservative activist Charlie Kirk who was shot and killed in September. The Vector College chapter was founded in the weeks after his death.
NCW Equity Alliance, the group that usually sponsors the Pride Banners, had applied a day before Turning Point, but the application was considered incomplete due to missing artwork. The city reached out to Juan Diaz, executive director of NCW Equity Alliance, and did not get a response until the next week. Diaz attributed the delay to a slow-responding vendor.
The city operates on a first come, first serve basis for banner applications.
Diaz had tried to appeal the city’s decision but was denied.
Other groups had tried to claim that Turning Point filled out the application incorrectly. The application stated “Turning Point USA Vector College” instead of “Turning Point USA Vector,” which is the group’s name in the IRS non-profit database.
Only not-for-profit groups are allowed to sponsor a banner in Wenatchee.
The city acknowledged the mistake but categorized it as an “unintentional clerical error” in the application, according to Edgar Reinfeld, Wenatchee police chief and interim city administrator.
The day after NCW Equity Alliance’s application was declined by the city due to initially missing artwork, the city approved Turning Point’s application even with their error.
Idaho bans cities from flying pride flags
In Idaho, the state has outright banned all non-government flags, including the pride flag, from flying.
The city of Boise has resorted to putting pride wraps on the city flagpoles since a state law was enacted banning the state’s capitol from flying Pride flags or face a steep fine for every day it flies.
“The city’s actions are not defined by any action taken by the statehouse,” Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said.
Bosie had flown a pride flag in front of city hall for years now, despite a law enacted in 2025 banning cities from flying unofficial flags. The law did not include a way to enforce violations.
The city responded by classifying the Pride flag as an official city flag. After the law was amended this year to include the $2,000 fine, the city took down the Pride flag and wrapped the flagpoles in rainbow colors instead.
Supporters of the law frame it in terms of neutrality. Government spaces, they argue, are funded by taxpayers and should not signal support for one group over another.
Rep. Ted Hill (R-Eagle), who had been key in signing both flag bills into law, criticized Boise’s workarounds.
“That’s lawless, insubordinate, and intolerable,” he said during a committee hearing.
Bosie councilmember Meredith Stead said the goal is not to provoke, but to reflect the community.
“I want Boise to be a place where people feel like they want to live in,” she said. “I’ve seen a positive response from the community and online.”
At the same time, the city is operating within limits.
“We have a commitment and obligation for taxpayers not to be fined,” Stead said.
For Stead, the approach is less about defiance and more about continuity.
“We’re not trying to be rebels,” she said. “We’re just trying to continue to communicate the values that we’ve long held.”
City park flag policy sparks dispute in Lynnwood
Elsewhere, residents in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood are having issues getting the city government to raise a Pride flag for an event in June.
Wilcox Park, which is home to 27 variants of American flags, seems like an obvious choice to fly a city pride flag, said Lynnwood Pride Director Charlette LeFevre.
The group had requested the city raise a Pride flag at the park for the past three years – and had been denied every time.
The city will fly a Pride flag at city hall this year, but LeFevre says that is too out of the way. Wilcox Park gets more attention than city hall, she said.
“It really is invisible. It's extremely disappointing,” she said of the city hall flagpole location. “The visibility of that flag is so important.”
The city did not have an official public Pride event until 2025, up until then the city had raised the Pride flag but the actual raising was only open to city employees.
LaFevre had tried to attend in 2024 but was told by city officials to leave the event.
“It seemed like they were just doing it for their own edification,” she said. “Personally, I've never heard of a private Pride flag raising.”
The next year, the city held a public flag raising, which LaFevre said made it difficult for people to attend since it was in the middle of a workday.
That year, Lynnwood Pride hosted a gathering at Wilcox Park where they tried to raise their flag on the center pole. It was taken down later in the day.
The city adopted a stricter flag policy in September 2025, under the direction of then-mayor Christine Frizzell. Under the new policy, non-government flags can only be flown in front of city hall, at the mayor’s judgement.
The new policy was not widely shared with the public and the rest of the city council, as current Lynnwood mayor George Hurst noted during a recent Lynnwood City Council work session.
“The process was not very good when putting this policy together,” he said.
Hurst added even though he was on city council when the policy went into effect, he had not heard of it until he took office in January.
“I think it would have been a great benefit to the community and to the council to have been aware of this policy,” he said. “But after reading it and doing research, and discussions with the city attorney, I am confident this policy is fair.”
Councilmember Isabel Mata suggested deferring any flag-related decision to the city council.
“While our current policy may be fair, I think that it’s limited in the fact that it only allows for commemorative flags at the discretion of the mayor and only at city hall,” Mata said. “I feel that’s doing a disservice to our community when we have a wonderful flag park, as its named, that we could be doing something at.”
Mata pointed to neighboring cities Bellingham and Bothell whose approval process to fly a non-government commemorative flag lies in the city council instead of the mayor.
Since the original policy was enacted by the mayor as executive policy, the current mayor would have to sign off on it.
In terms of this year’s Lynnwood Pride flag raising, it is scheduled as a three-hour event on the first Saturday of June in the early afternoon next to the city hall.
LeFevre plans on hosting her own Pride event in Wilcox Park at the start of June, where she will once again attempt to raise the Pride flag on their own extension pole.
“We’ll hoist our own flag, and it'll probably only be there for the day,” she said. “It is our expressive right to honor and recognize and hoist, albeit for just a few hours, the Pride flag for thousands to see.
