The Yakima City Council held a regular meeting on May 20, 2025, at 5:30 PM in City Hall Council Chambers. The meeting included public comments, approval of a consent agenda, department items covering airport improvements, a legislative session update, and a new massage business ordinance, followed by directives for two proclamations. The meeting adjourned at 6:26 PM.
Good evening and welcome. I will call the Aquima City Council May 20th, 2025 to order. We'll start with roll call, please. Bird? Here. Brown? Here. Buyers? Present. DCO? Here. Glenn? Here. Irena? Here. Roy. Here. Thank you, Council. Please stand and join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. Indivisible with liberty. Next, we'll have Interpreter Services. Thank you. Everyone will be allowed two and a half minutes. When you come to the microphone, please give us your name and the city in which you live. Also, um, individuals who wish to provide public comments remotely may submit a public comment request from online at www.yakimawa.gov slash counsel slash public comment. No later than two hours prior to the start of the meeting. One other thing I like to add is that um where'd it go? But I will tell you that because we are in um election season, that nobody may use this time for election purposes from now until the end of the election period. So you may not use it to support yourself or another candidate. Thank you. In all fairness, other small individual small investors, those owning one to ten rental properties, own most 70% of all the single family rentals. But both of these groups are increasing their holdings daily. Washington now has the sixth highest rents in the nation, putting our median rent and the state at a whopping $1,731 a month. Why should this concern us? In your reading from last week, the very last included line stated that the difference in median household wealth between those who were purchasing their home and those who rented was a dramatic difference. 255,000 for homeowners versus 6,000 for renters. For at least 50% of all Americans, their home is their primary source of personal wealth, their nest egg. If you remove this ability to buy property from an average citizen, you are essentially dooming them to long-term poverty. But most investors don't care. For them, it's all about their bottom line. They simply don't consider the fact that when they use their vast capital reserves to buy a property for rent, someone else doesn't get to buy it to live in and build their personal wealth. But does this loss for the average citizen stop with investors? Remember, we talked about a third entity in this housing room, and it's a very territorial, mostly invisible, super giant and very mean gorilla, and a gorilla that most likely controls the giant whale and that first giant elephant in the room. To understand the gorilla, let's start here. In the early 1800s, a German idealist named Hegel introduced Hegelian dialectic. It's a way of coming to or forcing a different conclusion from the norm onto or into a group of people. Here's how it works. You have something, an idea, an invention, a revolution that you want to introduce and sell people, but you know they won't like it, and they will resist it, but you think you know better. You create a problem or a crisis so that the thing, the idea you want to introduce will be the answer to the crisis. When the time is right, you introduce what you want as the answer to their crisis.