City Council Roundup

At Tuesday's regularly scheduled meeting, the City Council approved a lease for a division of Google Inc. to and gave the green light for a project that will .

With help from the Beverly Hills Firemen's Association, the union that represents the city's firefighters, the council was also able to .

The Beverly Hills Fire Department has agreed to defer its 3 percent salary increase to fund the furlough days planned for April 1, May 6 and June 3 so that nonessential city workers can stay on the clock. Emergency services and city schools are not affected by furloughs.

"I'm proud to say [firefighters] unanimously voted in favor of modifying our [salary agreement] to prevent any remaining furlough days," said Dave Perusse, treasurer of the Beverly Hills Firemen's Association. "Keeping the employees working in the city and providing a service to the community is the right thing to do, and it just makes sense."

The council also made the following appropriations during the meeting:

• $14,800 from a state homeland security grant to upgrade nearly 300 radios "to be compliant with FCC narrowbanding requirements," according to the meeting's agenda.
• $48,000 to Francis Krahe & Associates Inc. to coordinate the installation of solar energy equipment at the Civic Center parking garage.
• $272,029 to Layne Christensen Co. to repair groundwater wells.
• $254,711 to Braun Northwest Inc. for an equipment vehicle for the police department's SWAT team.
• $275,000 from the city's asset forfeiture fund "for the payment of overtime for narcotics investigations, [to] purchase servers for the High Tech Crimes Unit, and to place a seized vehicle into service in an undercover capacity," the agenda stated. Part of this appropriation included $98,900 to Mainline Information Systems Inc. for "storage/disk augmentation."
• $125,779 to Independent Technology Group for new equipment and services related to the city's Virtual Private Network.
• $124,708 to Guardian Power Protection Services Inc. to replace outdated equipment at Beverly Hills fire stations, parks and water reservoirs.
• $90,000 to Matrix Imaging Products Inc. included in a total not to exceed $240,000 for "application development and document conversion services for the police department and community development department, and any additional as needed services related to the city's document backlog initiative," according to the agenda.

During an afternoon study session held before the regularly scheduled meeting, the council removed an agenda item that called for matching taxpayer funds provided for the 2012 Beverly Hills Rose Parade float.

"We haven't done the complete budget process yet and given the current economic situation, we didn't feel comfortable having city money going to this," Councilwoman Lili Bosse said after the meeting.

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