YAKIMA, Wash. – The Yakima City Council held a meeting on Tuesday to get input from the community on proposed parking fees for downtown Yakima.
The community expressed overall negative feelings towards the current parking situation in downtown Yakima.
“Downtown is trending down,” said H&H Furniture Owner Mark Peterson. “It is trending down. It’s a serious problem. Parking, and we’re all talking about parking and I didn’t know about the $50 tickets or anything, but parking is a symptom. It is not the disease.”
However, despite the overall negative feelings, community members also expressed hope towards improving downtown Yakima.
“It can bring out downtown back to life by the people that stand or sit behind me,” said Mama Corie’s Kitchen Owner Corie Ratliff. “We can do this as a community and we need to find a way. We just can’t give up and die.”
The Yakima City Council was receptive to the comments and feedback given by the community, according to Deputy Mayor of Yakima Matt Brown.
“That was awesome,” said Brown. “We typically don’t have that many people show up to a council meeting and it’s really great to see folks engaged and actually giving us feed back and now we have to do something with it. We can’t just sit around a listen, now it’s time to actually get some action going.”
The community members that attended the meeting also felt that their concerns were well received by the city council.
“It was productive on our end,” said The Alignment Co. Owner Demitri Ray. “I mean, we wanted to definitely say what we had to say and hopefully get the council to kind of understand that we’re here to grow. I think as a community, we need growth. So I feel like we got our message.”
