HomeMy WebLinkAbout09/09/2014 04 Council General InformationBUSINESS OF THE CITY COUNCIL
YAKIMA, WASHINGTON
AGENDA STATEMENT
Item No. 4.
For Meeting of: September 09, 2014
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ITEM TITLE:
SUBMITTED BY:
SUMMARY EXPLANATION:
Council General Information
Sonya Claar Tee, City Clerk
1. Letter from Governor Jay Inslee
2. City Meeting Schedule
3. Preliminary Future Activities Calendar
4. Preliminary Council Agenda
5. Newspaper/Magazine Articles:
* "The greatest threat to our liberty is local governments run amok and only a strong federal
government can stop them," New Republic, September 3, 2014 (submitted by Council Member
Ensey)
Resolution: Ordinance:
Other (Specify):
Contract: Contract Term:
Start Date: End Date:
Item Budgeted: Amount:
Funding Source/Fiscal
Impact:
Strategic Priority:
Insurance Required? No
Mail to:
Phone:
APPROVED FOR
SUBMITTAL:
RECOMMENDATION:
City Manager
ATTACHMENTS:
Description Upload Date
information 9/4/2014
Type
Cover Memo
1111111111111111111111
Governer
"ne
Imw
"TE F WASHINGTON
Office of the Governor
August 28, 2014
Yakima City Council
129 North 2°d Street
Yakima, WA 98901
Dear Members of the Yakima City Council:
RECEIVED
CITY OF YAKIMA
SEP 022014
OFFICE OF CITY COUNCIL
I am writing you today about Federal District Court Judge Thomas Rice's decision last week that
found the City of Yakima in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and invalidated the city's
current system for electing City Council members. I'm sure you were as alarmed as I was that
the Court determined that the city's electoral process "is not equally open to participation" by
Yakima's large Latino population.
I was heartened to read that the city would work to comply with Judge Rice's ruling. The
Yakima City Council now has the opportunity to show leadership on behalf of the city and all of
Washington. I want to respectfully request that the Council send a clear message by voting to
not appeal the Court's decision and instead focus on implementing a plan to address this serious
issue.
This is not just about Yakima. Numerous jurisdictions in our state suffer from a lack of diversity
in political leadership and representation, at odds with our shared goal of a truly representative
democracy. We all should be concerned when a city in our state is found to be in violation of the
Voting Rights Act. Full participation in the electoral process is one of the touchstones of our
democracy.
As a former resident of the Yakima Valley, I know your city has many things to be proud of.
This is an opportunity for a show of civic leadership that I believe would be admired throughout
Washington.
Very truly yours,
0Dc',4r w „PI pf „). 1E3 x 40002 0 Oily vnruoa, sdhuvu ngton 98504,-0002 0 (360) 902-4111 0 . ;oveu° or wa.gov
CITY MEETING SCHEDULE
For September 8, 2014 — September 15, 2014
Please note: Meetings are subject to change
Monday, September 8
8:30 a.m. Pension Board meetings — 1St Floor Conference Room
3:30 p.m. Civil Service Commission — Council Chambers
Tuesday, September 9
10:00 a.m. City Council study session — Council Chambers
1:30 p.m. County Commissioners agenda meeting — Council Chambers
Wednesday, September 10
11:00 a.m. Boundary Review Board — Council Chambers
1:30 p.m. EMS Board meeting — Yakima Regional
3:30 p.m. Yakima Planning Commission meeting — Council Chambers
5:30 p.m. Yakima Parks & Recreation Commission meeting — Council Chambers
Thursday, September 11
9:00 a.m. Hearing Examiner — Council Chambers
1:00 p.m. Harman Center board meeting — Harman Center
1:30 p.m. Yakima Regional Clean Air meeting — Council Chambers
2:00 p.m. Bid opening — 1St Floor Conference Room
3:00 p.m. Homeless Network Coalition meeting — Neighborhood Health
5:30 p.m. YCDA board meeting — New Vision
Office Of Mayor/City Council
Preliminary Future Activities Calendar
Please Note: Meetings are subject to change
Meeting
Date/Time
Mon. Sept. 8
8:30 a.m
Tue. Sept. 9
10:00 a.m.
12:00 p.m,
Wed. Sept. 10
12:00 p.m.
1:30 p.m.
3:30 p.m.
5:30 p.m.
Thur. Sept. 11
1:00 p.m.
1:30 p.m.
3:00 p.m.
5:30 p.m.
Tue. Sept. 16
12:00 p.m.
5:00 p.m.
6:00 ,m.
Wed. Sept. 17
8:00 a.m.
2:00 p.m.
330•m
Thur. Sept. 18
2:00 p.m.
Mon. Sept. 22
12:00 p.m.
12:00
Organization
Pension Board Meeting
City Council Study Session
Miscellaneous Issues
Iw
Welcome Fire Mechanics
Convention
EMS Board Meeting
Yakima Planning
Commission
Parks & Recreation
Commission
Harman Center Board
Meeting
Yakima Regional Clean Air
Meeting
Homeless Network Coalition
Meeting
YCDA New Vision Board
meeting
Miscellaneous Issues
(T) City Council Executive
Session
City Council Meeting
Welcome WFOA
TRANS -Action Meeting
Arts Commission Meeting
Council Built Environment
Committee meeting
Capitol Theatre Board
Meeting
Greenwav Board Meeting
Board Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Dittmar
Council
Scheduled Meeting Cawley, Coffey,
Dittmar
Scheduled Event Cawley
Board Meeting Lover
Scheduled Meeting Ensey
Scheduled Meeting Adkison
Board Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Adkison
Cawley
Scheduled Meeting Coffey, Lover
Board Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
fl
Scheduled Event
Scheduled Meeting
Adkison
Cawley, Coffey,
Adkison
Council
Cawley
Ettl
Scheduled Meeting Adkison
ati n`
1st Floor Conference Room
Council Chambers
TBD
IOW 1111
Convention Center
Yakima Regional
Council Chambers
Council Chambers
Harman Center
Council Chambers
Neighborhood Health
New Vision
TBD
Council Chambers
Council Chambers
MMIVIEHMIIINIESTAMIIMMIIIMANNI(61111HIMIMMAIN10141,11.11111111/110601045.040
Convention Center
WSDOT
2nd Floor Conference Room
Scheduled Meeting Coffey, Lover, 2nd Floor Conference Room
Cawley (alt)
Board Meeting Coffey Capitol Theatre
Board Meeting Etti Greeny a Visitors Center
Tue. Sept. 2
11:30 a.m.
12:00 p.m.
Wed. Sept. 24
12:00 p.m.
12:00 p.m.
3:30 p.m.
5:30 p.m.
Thurs. Sept. 25
1:30 p.m.
Fri. Sept. 26
10:00 a.m.
11:00 a.m.
1111111111110111
Sports Commission Meeting
Miscellaneous Issues
11 1
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
YVVCB Board Meeting
PAL Board Meeting
Yakima Planning
Commission
Historic Preservation
Commission
Council Economic
Development Committee
Council Public Safety
Committee Meeting
Council Partnership
Committee Meeting
v,w. _......u,:MUI
Board Meeting
Board Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Scheduled Meeting
Ettl
Cawley, Coffey,
Ensev
Adkison
Dittmar
Ensey
Coffey
Cawley, Coffey,
Dittmar
Adkison, Dittmar,
Lover
Cawley, Adkison,
Ettl
Yakima Hotel & Conference
Center
TBD
Convention Center
PAL Center
Council Chambers
Council Chambers
2nd Floor Conference Room
2nd Floor Conference Room
2nd Floor Conference Room
DRAFT PRELIMINARY FUTURE COUNCIL AGENDA
September 16. 2014
014
(T) 5:00 p.m. Executive Session — Council Chambers
6:00 p.m. Business Meeting — Council Chambers
• City of Yakima Apple Award presented to Brian Smillie, City of Yakima
Firefighter
• Design and implementation of North First Street Project
• Downtown parking plan
• Consideration of accepting private streets (Maui Lane & Kona Place) as
public streets
• Resolution authorizing an agreement with FCS Group for Phase II of the
Utility Billing Process
• An ordinance amending the City of Yakima Leaves of Absence ordinance
of the Yakima Municipal Code to show the management group paid time
off policy; amending YMC chapter 2 to update language and reconcile with
bargaining agreements
• An ordinance amending the City of Yakima municipal code to reflect the
organizational change for human resources becoming a city department;
amending YMC 1.18.005 ; amending YMC 1.18.015; and amending YMC
1.18.100
• An ordinance amending the City of Yakima municipal code to update the
reporting requirement for secondhand dealers and amending YMC
5.64.060
Public Hearings
• Public Hearing re utility tax options
9/4/2014
10:34 AM
Ferguson's Lesson: Local Government Poses the Real Threat to Liberty 1 New Republic Page 1 of 4
10 f
NEW REPUBLIC
Politics
September 3, 2014
The Greatest Threat to Our Liberty Is Local
Governments Run Amok And only a strong
federal government can stop them
171 V Tweet
454 f Share
By Franklin Foer !I' @franklinfoer Photo: Getty Images
he libertarian's jeremiads about creeping tyranny often seem the ravings of a paranoid. Then
T along comes Ferguson to confirm the dark warnings: Warrior cops stalk suburban streets,
dressed in Desert Storm green and wielding automatic weapons aimed to fire. They detain
journalists, hurl smoke bombs into unarmed crowds, and bury incriminating details.
And yet, even though libertarians were plenty prescient in warning about the militarization of the police,
they still managed to get it wrong. As Rand Paul - http://time.com/3111474/rand-paul-ferguson-police/ -
argued in an impassioned op-ed on the conflagration in Missouri: "Not surprisingly, big government has
been at the heart of the problem." But what Ferguson shows is that the heart of the problem is, in fact,
small government—the cops, prosecutors, and their bosses with an inflated sense of their powers. The
great and growing threat to liberty in this country comes from states and localities run amok.
These are boom times for provincial autocrats. In many chunks of the country, state and local politics
were once a competitive affair; there was an opposing political party ready to pounce on its foe's
malfeasance. That sort of robust rivalry, however, hardly exists in an era in which blue and red states
have become darker shades of themselves. Thirty-seven states - http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections
http: //www.newrepublic.com/article/ 119249/fergusons-lesson-local-government-poses-real-... 9/4/2014
Ferguson's Lesson: Local Government Poses the Real Threat to Liberty 1 New Republic Page 2 of 4
-and-campaigns/these-unified-states-state-legislatures-magazine.aspx - now have unified governments,
the most since the early '50s. And in many of these places, there's not even a remote chance that the
ruling party will be deposed in the foreseeable future. The rise of one-party government has been
accompanied by the evisceration of the local press and the near -extinction of metro -desk muckrakers
(14,000 newsroom jobs have vanished in the last six years), crippling the other force most likely to call
attention to official misdeeds.
The end of local media hasn't just removed a watchdog; it has helped to complete a cultural reversal.
Once upon a time, Jefferson and Tocqueville could wax lyrical about local government, which they
viewed as perfectly in sync with the interests of its yeoman citizenry. Whether this arcadia ever truly
existed is debatable. But it certainly hasn't persisted into the age of mass media. Nowadays, most
Americans care much more passionately about national politics than they do about the governments
closer to their homes. They may harbor somewhat warmer feelings toward states and localities, but
those sentiments are grounded in apathy. Most Americans can name their president. But according to a
survey conducted by Georgetown University's Dan Hopkins, only 35 percent can identify their mayor.
The nostrum that local government is actually closer to the people is now just a hollow piece of antique
rhetoric.
I s r�arirrn by V
With so many instances of unobstructed one-party rule, conditions are ripe for what the political scientist
Jessica Trounstine calls "political monopoly"—officials and organizations who have so effectively
defeated any potential predators that they can lazily begin to gorge. She writes: "When politicians cease
to worry about reelection, they become free to pursue government policy that does not reflect
constituent preferences. They acquire the ability to enrich themselves and their supporters or pursue
policies that would otherwise lead to their electoral defeat."
This past year alone has provided some spectacular examples. Chris Christie rough-housing a political
enemy in Fort Lee; Robert McDonnell stuffing his closet full of gifts from a dietary -supplement magnate;
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119249/fergusons-lesson-local-government-poses-real-... 9/4/2014
Ferguson's Lesson: Local Government Poses the Real Threat to Liberty 1 New Republic Page 3 of 4
Ray Nagin sentenced to prison for swapping New Orleans's city contracts for several truckloads of
granite for his kids' countertop company; two former attorneys general of Utah arrested for pocketing
bribes and tampering with evidence to protect their pipeline of lucre. When the Center for Public
Integrity commissioned a comprehensive study of state governments, 18 states received Ds, eight
outright flunked, and not one got an A.
It's not just egomaniacal politicians who have amassed power and riches for themselves. At times, it
seems, the whole system has followed their lead, with entire branches of government falling into the
hands of oligarchs. In West Virginia, the mining boss Don Blankenship spent more than $3 million
electing a state Supreme Court judge. His beneficiary then provided the decisive vote in a favorable
verdict that saved him $50 million. (Photographs also later showed Blankenship vacationing with the
court's chief justice on the French Riviera.) Or there was the especially grotesque example of the
impoverished town of Bell, California, where nearly every public official extracted Wall Street–sized
salaries for themselves. Even the city manager's assistant pulled in $375,000 a year.
If there's a signature policy of this age of unimpeded state and local government, it's civil -asset
forfeiture. The program sounds benign enough: Authorities can unilaterally confiscate cash or property
that it considers illegally begotten; many states then place the proceeds straight into its own coffers to
fund further crime -fighting. But the reality of the policy is aggressive and arbitrary. As Sarah Stillman
graphically exposed in a magisterial New Yorker investigation -
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken - last year, in many states law enforcement can
seize a person's assets without ever charging him with a crime. Her reporting chronicled one appalling
story after another—cops who ran a $50 million forfeiture ring in Bal Harbour, which funded the
purchase of luxe cars and first-class airplane tickets; a party at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit,
where guests were knocked to the ground and forced to hand over their cars. Their offense: Dancing
and drinking in a space that wasn't properly permitted. Even if local governments wanted to roll back
this legalized Boss Hoggism, they couldn't. Police depend far too heavily on the revenue it generates.
(Something similar seems to have happened in Ferguson, where police processed an average of three
warrants for each household—milking millions in fines and court fees from the poorest residents to
bankroll its operations.)
The greatest danger of untrammeled local power is that majorities will use their control of government to
stampede the rights of minorities, both racial and political, in their midst. Since the 2010 election, more
than 20 states—most of them under GOP control—have enacted new voting restrictions, thinly veiled
efforts to suppress the minority vote. And Republicans have also ruthlessly redrawn the legislative map
of the South, creating supermajorities that have started to roll back the gains of the civil rights era.
Immigrants, too, are especially vulnerable to the whims of local leaders. Surges of nativism in the last
two decades haven't produced draconian national reforms, due to the knotty national politics of the
issue. But at the state and local levels, harsh feelings translate directly into cruel laws. In 2011,
Alabama briefly gave police the authority to demand that immigrants show their papers at traffic stops
and ordered schools to check the status of kids and their parents. A raft of towns have passed laws
forbidding landlords from renting to undocumented immigrants.
The seer who predicted much of this was, of course, James Madison. In "Federalist #10," he warned
that smaller units of government were particularly susceptible to being coopted by its elites. He favored
a larger republic that would draw from a greater population pool and therefore recruit a higher caliber of
talent. And since successful electoral coalitions would require a substantial number of votes, a larger
republic would limit the potential of a corrupt faction seizing power: "It will be more difficult for unworthy
candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried."
Madison wasn't remotely opposed to empowering states, which have been at the vanguard of many
movements to expand individual rights. And he worried obsessively about the potential for the federal
abuse of powers. But he also helped design a central government equipped to curtail its own
overreaching impulses, which are real and plentiful enough. The national government, after all, has a
less than impeccable record, especially during wartime, when it produces the likes of the Patriot Act or
http://www.newrepublic. com/article/ 119249/fergusons-lesson-local-government-poses-real-... 9/4/2014
Ferguson's Lesson: Local Government Poses the Real Threat to Liberty 1 New Republic Page 4 of 4
worse. Yet its abuses, unlike those of its smaller counterparts, tend to quickly emerge into public view,
as they did with the National Security Agency scandal. They are raked over by a feisty national press,
interrogated by congressional committees, and reviewed by layers of courts. Federal abuses aren't
always corrected, but at least they get vigorously debated, which is itself a barricade against future
encroachments.
Centuries ago, in the age of monarchs, the preservation of liberty required constraining the power of the
central state. In our era, protecting rights requires the opposite. Only a strong federal government can
curb the autocratic tendencies burbling across the country. Libertarians worry about the threat of local
tyrants, too, but only abstractly. In practice, they remain so fixated on the perils of Washington that they
rigidly insist on devolving power down to states, cities, and towns—the very places where their
nightmares are springing to life.
Franklin Foer is editor of The New Republic.
http://www. newrepublic. com/article/ 119249/fergusons-lesson-local-government-poses-real-... 9/4/2014
Memorandum of Transmittal
To: Yakima Planning Commission
From:
Date:
Subject:
Yakima City Council, Mayor of Yakima
Tony O'Rourke, City Manager
Joan Davenport, Director of Community Development
September 9, 2014
Request for Sign Code Amendment Consideration
Summary of Request
The Yakima City Council has identified four key areas of the Sign Code (YMC 15.08) for which they
are requesting that the City Planning Commission commence the amendment process:
1. Possible removal of Temporary and Window signs from the broad list of items included in the
"Exempt Sign" provisions; Otherwise, the Council thought that the Exempt Sign provisions
were appropriate. Possible review of list of other "Exempt: signs to see if they may need to be
addressed.
Council Comments: Re -name "Exempt" sign section.
2. Amend the requirements for Temporary signs to establish a size limit for temporary signs (32
sq. ft. was suggested).
Council Comment: Some concern that we may be over -regulating this area. However, there is
interest in further definition of the Temporary signs, such as material update (painted signs
was used as example).
3. Amend the requirements for Window Signs to limit the amount of the window that may be
covered by a sign (25% was suggested);
Council Comment: The Council is not decided on the percentage or method at this point
4. Add a definition and standards for Display Case Signs, such as those used in a movie theater
Council Comment: No specific additional direction on this issue
Background
The City Council Built Environment Committee met on August 21, 2014 to discuss the above
mentioned sign code amendments. This list was developed as a result of discussion at previous City
Council sessions. At the August 5, 2014 City Council meeting the report on potential sign code
revisions was discussed with direction to forward the policy items to the Built Environment for review
and comment. The Council discussion focused on the items listed below, which reflect the Council
direction and are a modification of the previous suggestions:
Council Action:
Forward these amendments to the Planning Commission for consideration in the 2014 Code update
cycle.