Wastewater option, road repairs on agenda

Learn more:

What: Davis City Council meeting

Where: Community Chambers at City Hall, 23 Russell Blvd.

When: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday

Watch it: Live on City Government Channel 16 on Comcast and on AT&T U-Verse Channel 99

Follow: @TomSakash on Twitter

The Davis City Council will take one more crack Tuesday at deciding whether to study a regional project to share wastewater treatment services with the city of Woodland.

Due to a tightly packed meeting agenda on Jan. 29, the council opted to delay its approval of a not-to-exceed limit of $220,000, which staff is asking for to assess a project that would send Davis waste to Woodland, rather than the local project the city has been working on for the past few years.

City staff believes the regional project with Woodland could potentially save the city of Davis $30 million over the next 30 years compared to the local project’s costs. The local project is estimated to cost about $95 million.

If the City Council approves the expenditure Tuesday for the study, city staff will conduct the analysis in collaboration with an outside consulting team — part of which will be paid for by Woodland, to the tune of about $50,000 to $90,000 — and then return in June to present the local project and the regional option, side by side, for the council to make a final decision between the two.

The council also will decide Tuesday on whether to consider a wastewater treatment upgrade proposal to the local plant by PERC Water, a private company that specializes in water reuse, which claims it could save the city 20 percent over the cost of the original local project plan.

Street maintenance

A total of 33 million square feet of street and bike path pavement runs throughout the city of Davis.

The City Council will begin to decide the best way to maintain all those many miles Tuesday when Bob Clarke, interim public works director, and Michael Mitchell, principal civil engineer, present their tentative ideas on how to prioritize the roads in need of repair and how to effectively and efficiently maintain the entire street and path system to avoid costly failures in the future.

Clarke and Mitchell’s staff report calls for the council to direct them to come back in May, after receiving the council’s input Tuesday, to lock in a maintenance strategy and to determine how to fund it.

Affordable housing 

Funding for affordable housing projects in cities across California took a huge hit last year when the state dissolved all redevelopment agencies.

But in a post-redevelopment age, Davis community development staff have begun to map out new, creative ways that would allow the city to continue to encourage the development of affordable housing locally.

Staff will ask the council Tuesday to direct its Social Services Commission to host a community forum to discuss various inclusionary requirement changes for new developments. An inclusionary requirement sets the percentage of how many units in a new development must be dedicated to affordable housing.

After the forum, staff would return in March with the results to ask for direction on implementing the new policies.

— Reach Tom Sakash at tsakash@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8057. Follow him on Twitter at @TomSakash

Tom Sakash

Tom Sakash covers the city beat for The Davis Enterprise. Reach him at tsakash@davisenterprise.net, (530) 747-8057 or @TomSakash.

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