The Yakima City Council held its regular meeting on May 5, 2026, starting at 5:46 PM (following a 5:15 PM executive session) and adjourning at 7:51 PM. The meeting included public comment, recognition, consent agenda actions, presentations on affordable housing and airport services, an update on community center RFI, discussion on ethics rules, and a report on Franklin Pool repairs.
All right. We'll call this regular meeting of the city council back to order. Uh clerk roll call, please. Berg. Here. Brown. Here. Hi, ears. Present. Blen. Here. Gonzalez. Here. Patrickus? Here. Roy? Here. All right. Thank you. Uh, Stan for the Pledge of Allegiance. Ready to begin. And to the Republic or which is one nation library for the justice. All right. Uh, interpreter services. Uh, Jorge, language connection. If somebody needs interpreting services, we have the system. All right, thank you. Next is public comment. Uh, if you would like to do public comment, there are forms in the back that you can hand up here to our clerk. Uh, each person participate in public comment will have two and a half minutes. Uh, Deputy Mayor Byrne here has a little red card when you get close to your time to give you a heads up. Uh, when you come up, if you could please state your first and last name in the city that you reside in, and then uh we'll get started here. So first up is Zachary Gallahan. Um, hello. Zachary Galland. I live in the city of Yakima, District One. Good evening, council members. Um, I'm here to ask you a question before the contracts for Flock A LPRs come up for renewal. What does safety actually mean to you? To me and many of my neighbors, safety doesn't mean being tracked, it means having a stable place to live, a job with dignity, health care when you're sick, parks, uh, or trust that our officials have our best interests at heart. Real safety is when people have what they need, not when every car they travel in is logged, like where they're going and how they got there. Um we have at least 87 flock cameras right now, and that's not to mention the literal hundreds that the county is adding. So in our city, the data is supposed to be stored for no longer than 21 days. That includes uh where you worship, where you work, who you visit, where you get medical care, and how you get there. In Yakima, where public transit is barely holding on. Your car is like a map of your life. Uh no one should have the right to that data, especially not I mean without cause, especially not like uh tech companies whose servers that data is stored on. Um the cameras don't solve crime. Uh they've flock itself has been caught forging their own statistics, and researchers have all walked back their endorsements. Cities everywhere are catching on.