City council will hold a public hearing tonight on expanding their powers for hiring contractors other than the lowest bidders.

The ordinance would let council consider new factors when picking contractors for city projects -- anything from whether a company’s caused problems for staff in the past, to whether they have a tendency to submit expensive change orders.

Councilors favored the ordinance when it first came up in late August. They’ll take a final vote after the hearing tonight.

They’ll also vote on updating their own travel policy. The proposed changes would clarify what the mayor and councilors need to include in public trip reports after traveling on city business.

It would also make it a councilors’ responsibility to get their own reports in on time -- and would ask them not to volunteer to travel if they hadn’t.

The proposed new language would not explicitly prohibit a councilor with late reports from traveling, as some councilors suggested at their last meeting.

And council will vote on an extra payment of $300,000 for PND Engineers to scope out potential paving projects for next summer. The city wants to use paving equipment as much as possible while it’s on the island, and they have more than $3 million left over in their current paving fund.

Next summer, the city wants to try and pave more of East Broadway, plus Gilman Road and Salmon Way, among others.

Council meets tonight at 6 p.m. at City Hall.