The Yakima City Council held a regular meeting on March 18, 2025, at 5:30 PM in City Hall Council Chambers. The meeting included public comments on the budget and a controversial police equipment contract, a public hearing on a rezone request, approval of multiple resolutions and ordinances, and discussion of state legislation. The meeting adjourned at 7:49 PM.
Good evening and welcome. I will call to order the um Yakima City Council regular business meeting for March the eighteenth, twenty twenty-five. We'll start with roll call, please. Berg. Here. Brown. Here. Byers present. DCO. Here. Glenn. Here. Herrera. Here. Roy. Here. Thank you. Please stand and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. Again. I pledge allegiance through the play at the United States of America. And we read public for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for our all. See alguien necessity interpreter, then I'll sistema disponible for next on the agenda's public comment. There will be thirty-five minutes allowed for a public comment with two and a half minutes per speaker in order to allow as much opportunity as possible. When you come to the microphone, please identify yourself and the city in which you live. Um my issue with this is one we're allotting a million dollars to this when the city is failing to pay other things that are very important. Second, this company acts on enterprises is problematic. Um if you just Google Acts on Enterprises and Controversy or Evidence.com, which is the website that they utilize for the community engagement software that's mentioned here. Um you'll find really problematic things. I won't go into all of them, but I will go into one. I just want to read this. A criminal defense lawyer noted that evidence.com's term of service gives the company a non-excuse, transferable, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use of photos and videos that are uploaded by its users. That means everything that is uploaded to this software, they claim is their property, and then they can utilize it any way they want. And that is not a good way to use the sensitive public information of the citizens of Yacoma. So that's my opposition to that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wheeler. Next is Jim Anson. Hello, my name is Jim Anson, and I live in Yakima City. And I'm an introvert, so I'm petrified to stand up here and talk to you all. You are very welcome. Great job. Okay. I wanted to speak to the uh Yakma Department of Recation, Parks and Recreation. And that's a big topic and a lot of things to cover, so I'm going to limit my comments to the Harman Center. Um I did a little looking into it because I wanted to know what I was talking about tonight. And the Harman Center, the figure that I found, this is from uh 2024. The expense of the city was 384,000. That's a lot of money. But I also found that 150,000 is returned to the city through the revenue collected at the Harman Center.