Remarks by Kurt Maier
56 remarks on the record, newest first · Page 2 of 3
- Play at 1:02:20
“Hi, it's me again. I suppose whether we want this annexation to go forward or whether we don't, this meeting needs to happen either way. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. I would recommend that we support scheduling this meeting. I would also recommend that the DOE... attend the meeting fully prepared with reasons that we should be annexing the 300 site in particular and exactly what the hell is in this for us. I understand that it's in our urban growth boundary but you know, if it's 99% owned by DOE, then it ain't exactly generating property taxes. So they need to have a coherent story for why…”
City Council · Aug 18, 2026
- Play at 1:10:11
“Yes, I'm back. I've been on both sides of this kind of table too. I've been a union member and I've been management in negotiating these contracts. And my job, my day job in computing is super easy because if I can learn enough facts, then I can just do the only right answer and it's fine. But your job is much harder. And it requires a lot of understanding of a lot of different topics and an ability to come to an agreement with somebody who, by the nature of the discussion, is sort of adversarial. And it takes a real professional to be able to juggle all that. And so I don't have any…”
City Council · Aug 18, 2026
- Play at 1:20:40
“Yes, it's me again. A while back I asked John for information about automated license plate readers in the city. Our contract with Flock has ended and the Flock cameras, as far as I know, have been removed, but we have automated license plate reader service from a different company called Axon and that's a pretty big difference Axon has a much different data protection and data access methodology than flock does And I asked for some information about that and I got it But I think that might be worth brief presentation about specifically Axon ALPR data protections just because I know this is…”
City Council · Aug 18, 2026
- Play at 10:30
“Vote for this change. Okay, we got to vote for the amendment. Yeah.”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 10:47
“I move to approve the agenda as amended. Second.”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 22:12
“I move to approve the consent calendar as read. Second.”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 37:40
“Sure. Thank you very much. I wanted to add this to the agenda. It's kind of a small issue, but it's one that's been consistently brought before me as long as I've been on council. The fact of the matter is Folks in the area are accustomed to a three-minute rule. I have yet to hear a compelling reason that Richland citizens should have less time to express themselves to their council than surrounding communities. I don't feel it's appropriate for us to put arbitrary barriers in front of our citizens in the interest of saving our own time or encouraging them to become better riders. I've seen…”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 44:47
“Yeah, I think that trying to put an overall cap is trying to solve a problem we've never had. The whole time I've been on council, the highest number of public comments we've received the difference between two and three minutes for each of those comments wouldn't have been that big a deal in the circumstances where there are a ton of comments being made I think that we can be a little bit more insistent procedurally about folks just saying they agree with the previous comment rather than taking the whole three minutes unless they have a substantive addition to make And I just don't think…”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 49:36
“Thank you. I was chatting with our city manager and he brought up a point which I believe we have discussed before, but another element we can do to compromise on the amount of time taken up by lengthy public comment. Currently, and I don't want anybody to feel called out, There is a bit of a habit of either applause or jeering after certain public comments are made. And if we instituted a rule kind of limiting how much post-comment festivities occurred, we may be able to reclaim a little bit of that time and efficiency without having to institute a cap. I would also be open to, for instance,…”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 1:02:38
“Okay, first from BFT, it is no longer July, and so we have exited the fare-free month for America 250. There is a grace period where operators are instructed to remind folks that we're going to be charging and checking passes and so forth again, and that grace period should run through the first week of August, I think through the 10th, but I could be wrong. So just to let folks know, the bus is now no longer fare-free. I also wanted to mention one of the in the very first presentation we got we got one of the people hired on was Phoebe Trask and I wanted to report that library staff is…”
City Council · Aug 5, 2026
- Play at 5:52
“If you tell me your hat size, I'll probably know.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 32:39
“I'm going to play devil's advocate here. I don't have a dog in the fight. I don't mind hydropower. I'm a supporter of it by and large. But as an elected official, I get people giving me the business about it all the time. So I'm going to repeat some arguments and questions that I've heard over the years. Okay. The dams are very old and there is they're not maintenance free. There is a finite service life on some of these turbines. Do we have readily available information on where we are in that life cycle and when we're going to have to make some serious investments to keep those dams running…”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 34:04
“And so where in a nutshell can I go to find information about that side of things, the maintenance and operations side of hydropower?”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 34:39
“I don't need to be that deep in the weeds.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 35:01
“Okay. Next thing is you mentioned you had an infographic up there between 2015 and 2024 retail power up 5.7% in Washington. I didn't write it down. 2.05% nationwide, I think you said. Yeah. A lot of numbers. So Lawrence Berkeley National Lab tracks average wholesale price of power. Unfortunately, they don't have data going back as far for specifically the mid Columbia region. Everybody's focused on ERCOT and all the other places where there are constant disasters. But average wholesale price, with the exception of a couple years of natural gas getting expensive, hasn't really risen at such a…”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 38:01
“And so that's a perfect segue. Please. I believe on the previous slide, or maybe it was just out loud, the sentence was that the total returns have tripled since the federal dams have been operating.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 38:17
“With the 1999 ad highlighted in a previous slide. Yeah. I have a degree in data analytics, and when I look at those two things next to each other, I see that the total returns have tripled since the 1999 ads talking about potential extinction. You see what I'm saying? Because it's pretty much a flat line until you get to the late 90s, and then all of a sudden, something caused something to change. Yeah. So I'm wondering... what we're trying to glean from this chart if it's, because what I hear is that that advertising campaign was super effective.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 40:27
“Okay, and then my last question. In the beginning of your presentation, you talked about how your organization didn't feel that these studies are necessary, that we've had enough of the studies, the ones that the governor is... Yeah. And then later on, just before I started harassing you, You said that we needed further studies, but somewhere else. Can you clarify which ones you think we don't need and which ones we do need?”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:04:39
“Yeah, I've got a quick question. I appreciate the breadth of information here. I'm kind of curious if you happen to have any information about what made Walla Walla drop to 8-year and keep to 12-year. Is that specifically because of the affordable housing requirement?”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:05:15
“Okay, and if... like what's the process for changing the program if you implement it right like if if let's say we picked two of them of the three and then decided four years later that we did it wrong and we needed to pick a different one what's is it just another ordinance or does it have to go through another comp plan how does that ordinance how does the program change”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:06:08
“And how about for the actual definition of the targeted area? Is that something you do once and then you're, that's it? Or is that something that can also be revisited through the same process? That can be revisited through the exact same process.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:15:04
“Yeah, I got so tied up in trying to ask about implementation details, I forgot to say that, yes, I also support moving forward with investigating this. And I agree that a mix of homeownership and rental opportunities would be key toward this being successful. We want it to still be breadth of opportunities. We don't want to get too restrictive about what we encourage, but I think that there's a lot of folks who might be waiting for the right development opportunity and they might find it with a program like this. So I'm strongly in support of moving forward.”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:42:45
“It's indefensible to me that we have, as a council, have prohibited the sale of marijuana in the city while this is allowed to be sold. This is life-ruining crap in a way that weed is not. Part of the problem with Kratom is the stuff's strong enough that no matter how responsible you were when you bought it, you weren't after you took it. And that's how I would imagine a lot of those underage exposures are happening. Having said that, we also do have a problem locally with underage purchases of all kinds of crap, including vapes, as anyone who has entered a high school in the past five years…”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:48:13
“I'd just like to clarify, when you say a total ban, you mean of all Kratom products, including the natural leaf product, or a total ban of the 7-OH concentrated stuff?”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026
- Play at 1:48:30
“Yeah, because there's a not immediately poisonous natural leaf product that I think...”
City Council · Jul 28, 2026