What will the City Council be considering Tuesday night? Well, I thought you’d never ask. Here are the highlights:

• First off, at-large councilman George Jacob will be attending the meeting via teleconference. Do you ever wonder what the person is doing while teleconferencing in to the meeting? Eating dinner, perhaps? Or watching the Olympics? All of a sudden, we hear him shout “GO USA!” because he forgot to hit the mute button…. Okay, maybe I’m the only one who wonders those things.
• The City is looking to get an electronic storage system for documents and images. By storing scans of documents and pictures in a centralized database, the City can be more efficient both in terms of physical space and retrieval time. One example given in the council communication is building plans. “Planning, Public Works, Inspections and Fire all receive building plans and each department is storing those plans independently. With this system, the plans can be scanned or saved if in electronic format and shared by all departments rather than each saving the large files and taking up additional space for either disk storage or the paper copies.” Sounds like a good idea. Cost: $81,000. Vendor: Advanced Processing and Imaging, Inc.
• The City is poised to spend $122,446.20 on a .22-mile bike trail extension with its own storm sewer system along Hickory Grove Rd. This is a curious expense. It’s at 100% city expense. The storm sewer portion will correct a drainage problem that has resulted in some flooding of residential backyards. Can someone tell me when the longstanding drainage issues in the fourth district got corrected that would have moved this fifth-district project up on the priority list?
• New sidewalks will be constructed around Manual High School. This was in response to Manual students walking in the middle of the road, obstructing traffic, ostensibly because sidewalks were in disrepair or nonexistent. What do you think? Will the construction of these sidewalk improvements keep the kids out of the street?
• It’s been two years since the City’s 20-year cable franchise agreement with (then) Insight Communications expired. Since then, there have been little extensions of a few months at a time while a new franchise agreement is negotiated. There will be another one of those extensions Tuesday night, this time until June 2009. Maybe someday they’ll actually come to terms on a new franchise agreement.
• The City will raise cab fares to a realistic level.
• The City has a chance to put a stop to the proposed three-story office building for Riverfront Village (you know, the big concrete slab on stilts that blocks the view of the river downtown). When the City approved the development back in March 2007, it had a deadline that construction would commence by December 2008. Well, that’s not going to happen, so now the developer wants to extend the deadline to December 2010. The council should be working toward eventually getting that monstrosity torn down, not adding to it. A three-story office building will only exacerbate the problem. This is the perfect opportunity to kill it.
• There’s a request for the Council to approve a resolution asking the state to raise our taxes supporting the City of Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics.
• There’s a request to put an electronic billboard at the intersection of I-74 and Knoxville Ave. The Zoning Commission recommended denial. It will be interesting to see if second-district councilmember Barbara Van Auken goes with the Zoning Commission’s advice, or if she votes to approve it anyway.

There’s one more item — the snow plan — but I’ll be looking at that in a separate post, coming up next.