The Yakima City Council met on October 15, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall Council Chambers. The meeting included public comment, a public hearing, several department ordinances and resolutions, and the first round of the 2025-2026 Biennial Priority Based Budget review. Key actions included approval of the YWCA right-of-way vacation (with payment of $70,000), a remand of the Columbia Ridge Homes vacation, and passage of ordinances on tourism promotion, parking permits, and shopping cart regulations.
Good evening and welcome, and I will reconvene the Yakima City Council meeting of October 15th, 2024. And before we get going, I do need to make an announcement. That is that due to technical difficulties, tonight's city council meeting will not be broadcast live on Spectrum Cable Channel 194. It will be streamed live on the City of Yacima website at www.yakimawa.gov forward slash council forward slash agendas dash and dash minutes. Rolls right off the writes up. You can get all that down, you can watch it live. All right. Thank you. Now how roll call, please. Berg. Here. Brown. Here. By ears. Present. DCO. Here. Glenn. Here. Herrera. Here. Roy. Yes. Thank you. Please rise and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. Again. I've led your reasons. And to the Republic for which one. You'll have interpreter services. Thank you. Good evening. Paracayos can necesiten the assistencia de un interprete. Les commandes at Sistema y estoy aquí disponible para hacerlo. Gracias. Gracias. Thank you. Next on the agenda is public comment. There will be 35 minutes allowed for public comment this evening, with two and a half minutes allowed for anyone who wishes to speak. If you want to speak during public comment, please make sure you fill out a form from the table in the lobby and turn it in to the city clerk. As you come to the microphone, please uh give us your name and the city in which you live. Okay, great. So the first person we have is Margaret Filkins. Hi, my name is Margaret Philkins, and I live and work in the City of Yakima. I appreciate your time this evening to hear my concerns about the current parking permit and renewal situation in downtown city lots. We recently learned that people with a current parking pass cannot renew their existing City of Yakima parking passes because there's a waiting list. Employers will be impacted by missing staff, potential expectation to pay tickets if their employee could not leave in time, and also the inconvenience for clients or customers, as well as the challenge of hiring staff who cannot afford to pay parking lot play parking lot route roulette or risk a ticket. So my questions and concerns are as followed. When I applied for a permit, I gave a credit card number, and I was under the uh understanding that I would auto-renew. I only found out that that wasn't the case when we tried to change the credit card and update it and found out that we no longer had a valid parking permit. If we hadn't tried to make that change, we would have been faced with a ticket.