San Carlos City Clerk Utilizes the AlphaCorp and Granicus Total Legislative Management Solution™

Software provides a complete agenda automation and video streaming records solution.

Introduction

San Carlos is located just off the west coast of San Francisco Bay. The city has a population of over 28,900 with over 160 employed by the city government. For over seven years, Christine Boland, has worked hard to provide city government and the public with accurate recording and efficient retrieval of records. As San Carlos’ city clerk, Boland creates, coordinates, and maintains the permanent record of council actions. She manages both the historical and current official records while insuring operational processes and procedures are correctly and legally followed. Boland, along with her staff of two assistant clerks and administrative personnel, respond to research requests from within the city government and public.

The Challenge

Like most cities, San Carlos used a manual agenda management process that resulted in time-consuming agenda and minutes preparation. It also resulted in costly and often lengthy records retrieval.

Before implementing the AlphaCorp and Granicus solution, Boland would meet with department heads a week prior to a council meeting to go over a draft agenda for the meeting. Boland would scribble notes as items were added to the draft agenda or moved to the long range draft agenda (LRDA). Back at her office, Boland would use her notes to update the draft agenda as well as cut and paste items to and from it to the LRDA—both word processing documents.

The week before the council meeting Boland would organize and print the final agenda. To complete the process she needed department managers to submit their staff reports. She would wait for 10 to 20 staff reports to come in without knowing their location. “They could be on someone’s desk, in their boss’ in basket, in my in basket, or maybe weren’t even written yet,” explains Boland. She would waste a lot of time locating the staff reports to complete the agenda for the next day’s council meeting. Ultimately, she created a staff report template and implemented procedures to make gathering the reports easier. But, the process as a whole remained somewhat labor-intensive.

During the meeting Boland would take the minutes. While she didn’t use a specific format, she did take detailed minutes on both discussion and action items. Recording a large amount of detail in the written minutes was challenging enough. But, it also required as much as 10 hours in post-meeting editing and formatting. After doing so, Boland would then copy the minutes for internal and public distribution as well as records storage.

Ultimately retrieving the records presented its own set of challenges. “I get everything under the sun about what the city council has acted upon from 1925 to the present,” said Boland. She did use a limited indexing software that allowed her to attach keywords to a document and retrieve by index number. But, as Boland explains, if you didn’t use the exact keyword in your search, the search would return nothing.”

In addition, the indexing software could only access documents back to 1980. Still other documents were stored in microfilm, but these were organized by permit number which made it difficult to locate documents unless you knew the number. “Plus, no one wanted to pull the microfilm machine out to use it,” said Boland.

The Solution

San Carlos decided to seek out an electronic document management system (EDMS) provider. Boland headed up the search. She discovered the technology existed that would allow her to automate the city’s agenda process.

Subsequently, the city decided to publish a request for proposal (RFP). Boland explained the urgency and concern of finding and selecting a qualified solution. “Our budget was starting to dwindle,” she said, “so we thought we better move forward because if we didn’t we were going to lose the money. We thought the worst thing that could happen would be to spend a ton of money on a product and then not see hide nor hair of the vendor after we wrote the check.”

Seventeen vendors responded to the RFP. Of those, the city selected three to demo their products. “We found through the demos the strong customer service philosophy of AlphaCorp and we really got addicted to it. You know we could feel it through the presentation and it was really attractive. It was a great thing to know that AlphaCorp would be there after the check had been cut,” remarked Boland.

Subsequently, San Carlos selected AlphaCorp as its EDMS and agenda automation solution provider. Not only did AlphaCorp hit the mark with its customer focus, but its SIRE Agenda Plus product would also provide the city with the solution it needed to fully automate its legislative management process. AlphaCorp would work with Granicus to provide the two companies’ tightly integrated Total Legislative Management Solution™.

Boland uses the solution to electronically create and manage council meeting agendas. It allows her to create an online agenda which meeting participants can add agenda items and staff reports to. Managers approve the items before the agenda is finalized. The agenda can be printed, but doesn’t have to be. Meeting participants can view directly from their PC if desired.

“As the meeting progresses, I’m time stamping the video so the agenda and the video record of the meeting match up,” explains Boland who types in the minutes during the meeting. “Before SIRE,” she says, “I was doing full blown minutes instead of the action minutes I take now. I’ve gone to the action format because we have the video, so if there’s ever a question you can just watch the video.”

Since agendas, minutes, action items, and meeting video are stored in AlphaCorp’s EDMS product—SIRE FileCenter—Boland and other staff members can easily search these records. When research requests come in, Boland and her staff can search for and retrieve documents right from their computers.

The Result

Implementing AlphaCorp’s Total Legislative Management Solution™ has saved San Carlos thousands of dollars and labor hours. These savings translate into a hard-dollar return for the city on its investment in SIRE.

Boland notes that the city is saving big on offsite storage fees that were costing the clerk’s office alone over $1000 a month. Additional dollars are saved because agenda packets are accessed online and staff reports can be uploaded and attached to the e-agenda. “Uploading staff reports and other files has saved thousands of dollars and thousands of sanity hours. I’ve gone from about 10 hours in minutes preparation down to about half an hour.” remarks Boland. “You can’t capture that on an ROI spreadsheet.”

The city is planning to integrate Accela’s Tidemark solution with SIRE in 2005. This will enable building permits and microfilmed data to be accessed along with legislative documents.

Does Boland have any advice for other cities facing similar challenges? “Many cities don’t know what to buy and they’re afraid to get an inadequate solution,” Boland says. “These cities can look to San Carlos and other cities who have both the AlphaCorp and Granicus solution to understand what the 21st Century holds in terms of total electronic records management.”