The Morgan Hill city council will consider a variety of business at their regularly schedule meeting. The meeting will take place at 7 p.m., at city council chambers at the former city hall building, 17555 Peak Ave. Some of the items on the agenda are:
– In an effort to cut back on pollution and the presence of non-biodegradable materials in the waterways and on land, the council will consider banning plastic grocery bags and Styrofoam-like takeout containers.
One possible action by the council tonight is to adopt a policy on single-use plastic grocery and retail bags similar to that of San Jose. That policy bans the plastic bags outright, and imposes a fee of 10 cents per paper bag requested by customers at retail and grocery outlets. That fee increases to 25 cents per bag in two years.
Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara County Cities Association recommends that all cities in the county adopt a ban on expanded polystyrene food and beverage packaging, more commonly known by the brand name Styrofoam. The material is considered a stormwater pollutant and breaks into tiny pieces when discarded, making cleanup difficult, according to a city staff report.
Tonight the council could vote to begin the outreach process to adopt a draft ordinance banning the materials by April 25, or direct staff to continue monitoring other local efforts to restrict the use of Styrofoam and report back to council chambers by July.
– PG&E will present a report on the cause and impact of three power outages last summer that left thousands of Morgan Hill residents without electricity for several hours.
The outages happened June 21, July 4 and July 5, 2011. The largest one – on July 5 – left more than 7,000 customers without power, according to a written report from PG&E.
The outages were caused by “underground cable splice failures” that required extensive repairs, according to PG&E.
The report also notes that PG&E’s Morgan Hill customers experienced more power outages in 2011 than did customers in Salinas, Gilroy and San Jose.
Plus, it lists more than $2.7 million in utility system maintenance and reliability investments over the past 18 months, and more than $570,000 in planned upgrades this year.
– The council will consider adopting a new public safety “outcome based strategic plan” to be presented by Morgan Hill police.
The plan will use four broad outcomes that police and city staff will try to achieve in order to ensure public safety, instead of simply measuring crime and safety by numbers of incidents and raw data, according to city staff. Each outcome has a series of measurement mechanisms that will periodically measure how close the city is to each outcome.
The outcomes presented in the draft outcome based strategy are to reduce the incidents of crime and traffic collisions; increase trust and confidence in the police department; increase the feeling of safety; and increase the proficiency of city staff.
