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Morgan Hill, California
71
Zucker Systems
VI.
ENGINEERING DIVISION/PUBLIC
WORKS DEPARTMENT
A.
P
ROFILE
Overview
The Public Works Department is responsible for a wide variety of services that, in
general terms, support the critical infrastructure of the City of Morgan Hill. For
purposes of this report, our focus is on those operations within the Public Works
Department that provide direct support to the private development review process.
Under the direction of the Public Works Director/City Engineer, the Land
Development Engineering section reviews and approves plans in conjunction with
proposed improvements to private property.
During the economic recession the Department downsized by eliminating the Deputy
Director position, an Engineering Aid position, and a Public Works Inspector
position. The responsibilities for various projects and tasks were shifted to the
remaining staff. Two examples of this are: 1) the loss/dilution of management
oversight without the Deputy Director position, and 2) the Engineers that had been
assigned exclusively to review development projects were also assigned to review and
manage Capital Improvement Projects (CIP). With the recovery of the economy,
which has produced a dramatic increase in new construction activity, the Land
Development Engineering Team is no longer capable of performing both the
increased new development reviews and the previously assigned CIP projects. We
feel the Engineering section needs to augment their staffing resources by adding both
full-time and contract staffing. The building and planning functions have been built
back up after the recession buy engineering has not.
The information we received from confidential customer surveys and comments
provided during our on-site focus group meetings with local developers indicated
there is a strong level of dissatisfaction with the level and type of services being
provided by this group. The two most frequently cited complaints were the lack of
timely reviews and the tendency of staff not to perform complete plan reviews early in
the process, which ultimately lead to major corrections being required late in the
process. Many customers believe these problems stem from the Senior Engineer’s
practice of reviewing all work produced by the two Engineers in the group before it
can be released to the customer. Despite this high level of review, staff and customers
report there are still frequent occurrences of significant problems not being identified
until the work has begun in the field.