Category: City Council

If you live in a dense Hillsboro neighborhood, maybe you’ve seen it: a Post Office employee walking mail down the street to a cluster of mailboxes, because someone else parked beside them. If this happens enough, the Postal Service eventually stops delivering mail to neighborhoods altogether. Hillsboro City Council is looking to change this, by amending its parking ordinance to ban parking within 11 feet of a curbside mailbox cluster between 8AM and 6PM on all days the mail is delivered. “This originated as a result of a number of large complexes with group boxes where we were not longer getting deliveries after repeated problems,” said Tina Baily, Transportation Program Manager for the City of Hillsboro. “There is nothing at[…]

Hillsboro may spend $9 million upgrading city streetlights to LEDs, a move officials say will save over $500,000 a year in energy and maintenance costs while cutting lighting energy usage by 70 per cent. The LED installation will be accompanied by a networked node on every utility pole, capable of alerting city employees when a light needs maintenance and which parts are needed. “We wouldn’t have to wait for a citizen to notify us,” city project manager Tegan Enloe said during a May 2 City Council work session. Currently lights are only fixed when someone calls to report it’s broken. The vast majority of Hillsboro’s 7,300 street lights are maintained by Portland General Electric (PGE), who sometimes take a while[…]

Hillsboro City Council passed a resolution re-designating the Hillsboro Enterprise Zone this week, but not without some dissent. Councilor Kyle Allen proposed that council delay voting on the zone for two weeks, due to concerns about the minimum wage provisions in the new proposal. “We give up property taxes for a number of benefits, one of which is employers pay 150 per cent of minimum wage to their employees,” said Allen, noting that the proposed deal for the next ten years brings this down to 105 per cent. While noting that the reason for the drop reflects a desire to attract smaller businesses to the District, Allen stated the policy should be reviewed, possibly having different sets of rules for[…]

City council was back to normal this week, with a meeting focused less on lightning-rod national issues and more on things like public art, students, and real estate development. No Hillsboro citizen felt the need to offer a public comment, and the meeting wrapped up in just 45 minutes—much shorter than the 4 hour marathon two weeks ago, when Mayor Steve Calloway declared Hillsboro a sanctuary city. The bulk of the session was devoted to a presentation by the city’s Youth Advisory Council, who spoke about their recent trip to Washington D.C. where they visited museums, met with politicians, and spoke with other youth advisors from around the country. I enjoyed meeting with the Hillsboro Youth Advisory Council today! Thank you[…]

Hillsboro publicly declared itself a sanctuary city last night as Mayor Steve Callaway cast a dramatic tie-breaking vote. The vote followed over three hours of public comment, and was the nail-biting conclusion to months of activism and debate in Oregon’s fifth-largest city. Councillors Kyle Allen, Anthony Martin, and Olivia Alcaire all backed the declaration; Darell Lumaco, Rick Van Beveren, and Fred Nachtigal all voted against. The mayor, who only votes in the event of a tie, voted for the measure, making Hillsboro the latest Oregon city to publicly declare itself a sanctuary city. After 3-3 vote from council, Mayor @SteveCallaway2 votes in favor of making Hillsboro a sanctuary city. pic.twitter.com/KxPKutZY7c — Claudia Ramos (@ClauRamosNews) March 8, 2017 Oregon law already[…]

Two weeks ago, 350 people crammed into Hillsboro’s city council chambers, many of them loudly demanding that Hillsboro declare itself a sanctuary city. The Hillsboro Tribune’s Travis Loose called it “mayhem,” you can watch the meeting yourself and decide what you’d like to call it. Last night’s meeting did not have that kind of attendance: most of the seats in the Shirley Huffman Auditorium were empty. But city officials made preparations, just in case. There was a significant police presence in the atrium before the meeting, and everyone who attended was handed a piece of paper explaining that the vote on the matter is taking place on March 7. Mayor Steve Callaway repeated the point. “We will not be deliberating about[…]