The Eugene City Council began work sessions April 13 on a proposal to ban natural gas hookups in new residential and commercial construction. Input from city staff and other agency officials and some businesses raised many issues related to this proposal, especially concerning commercial construction. Otherwise called "forced electrification" gas bans have been approved in several California cities. However, they do not have cold weather power outages like we do in Oregon which raised concerns about energy resiliency and reliability for Eugene citizens. The council voted to hold another work session no later than the end of July.