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After a week’s vacation, the city council returns tonight (Tuesday, Feb. 11) to its continuing task of closing a projected $10 million shortfall in the upcoming city budget. City Manager Phil Kamlarz has set up a series of 5 p.m. non-voting working sessions on various aspects of the budget, scheduled to continue through the end of March. 

Also this week, on Wednesday night, the Planning Commission will receive its subcommittee report on the formation of the UC Hotel and Conference Center Complex Task Force. 

Tonight’s city council working session will focus on ideas for raising new revenue, including suggestions listed as “parking fine payment changes” and a possible November tax increase ballot measure. 

At the request of Councilmember Linda Maio, the council will discuss a controversial budget-cutting proposal at its 7 p.m. regular meeting: a recommendation to defer construction on any new $25,000 traffic circles in the city, and instead investigate lower-cost designs that are already in place in other cities. Members of at least one community group, the LeConte Neighborhood Association, have been lobbying councilmembers to keep the present traffic circle construction schedule in place. 

Also for its 7 p.m. regular meeting, the council has scheduled the long-delayed vote on the Sprint wireless communications facility proposed for the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Cedar Street. The council held a public hearing on the facility last month, but held off voting on Councilmember Dona Spring’s motion to deny Sprint’s permit in order to give the company more time to submit information proving that the proposed facility is needed. The council has had the Sprint matter in its hands since April of last year, after neighbors appealed a decision by the Zoning Adjustments Board to grant the permit for the facility. Much of that time was taken awaiting a report from an independent evaluation of the project. 

On Wednesday night, the Berkeley Planning Commission will get its first look at the membership of the 25-member task force set up by the commission to “monitor, review, and make recommendations about the University of California’s proposed hotel and conference center project” on the Center-Shattuck-Allston-Oxford block site presently occupied by a Bank of America branch and several UC structures. Mayor Tom Bates said this week that while he believes that the membership of the task force is “balanced,” he continues to feel that the implementation of the task force should be delayed until he completes negotiations with UC over how much regulatory control the city will have over the building of the complex. 

The Planning Commission will also begin discussions Wednesday night on changing the city’s zoning code to bring it into compliance with the University Area Specific Plan. At present, the zoning code allows larger developments than would be permitted under the plan. The city council had set a March 16 public hearing on a proposed moratorium on mixed-use, above-three-story developments in the University Avenue area until the zoning code changes were put in place. But this week, City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque and City Planning Manager Dan Marks told members of the city council’s Agenda Committee that they would not now recommend such a moratorium. Both Albuquerque and Marks said that because state law only allows a 45-day moratorium to be imposed once, without extension, there was a danger that such a moratorium would end before the zoning code changes were made, and a developer could take advantage of the loophole by applying for a permit during the interim. Marks told the Agenda Committee members that the council would have enough time to enact a moratorium in the event a developer applied for a permit to build a larger project in the University Avenue area while the code changes were still being considered.