The white sand beaches of Pinellas County lure people from around the country to relocate, retire or visit throughout the year. But the easy-going vibe didn’t extend to county government. Workers were stretched thin by time-consuming, manual processes.
For example, in an instance where a department needed approval for an item by the county administrator or board, staff were required to prepare the document, attach any draft documents, send it through contract review, print out the revised version, add a paper checklist and use interoffice mail to route it for departmental review.
After this cumbersome process, the document could sit for days or even weeks on someone’s desk with no method of tracking it. When that person finally got around to signing off, it was sent to the next involved department where it could again sit and wait for approval.
“If there was an item that a board member wanted on the agenda for a January meeting, it had to be started back in September," said Becky Batten, IT applications developer at Pinellas County.
The lack of ability to track who was currently reviewing a document was a particular hardship. On many occasions, county workers had to drive to various offices to speed up the approval process in person.
Agenda items and all their supporting documents were required to be printed at every meeting, so the amount of paper for a single meeting could sometimes fill several boxes — in fact, Pinellas County once had a single agenda item that consumed four reams of paper.
SOLUTION: EMBRACING A MODERN, DIGITAL GOVERNMENT
Pinellas County knew that its manual system of processes was causing considerable stress and wasting tons of paper. After an extensive search, it decided to embrace a digitalization strategy that could automate much of what it does.
Partnering with Granicus, the county overhauled its agenda creation and approval workflow with tools like Legistar. Now a person drafting an agenda item can track where it is in the process and how long it’s been with a particular person. What used to take weeks for a single person now takes just a few days.
"A typical agenda item now takes just three weeks to approve. That’s about a quarter of the time it previously took," said Batten.
And once review is complete, the item can be added to the agenda seamlessly. Posting a completed agenda to the website takes just a few clicks. By providing board members with iPads, all meetings can be conducted paper free — unless a copy is specifically requested by somebody.
The streamlining doesn’t stop at agenda management. Using Granicus’ Video and Minutes solutions in tandem, clerks can stream the meeting live while creating video time stamps that can be integrated directly into the meeting minutes. All that’s needed after the fact is video trimming and proofreading the minutes before they can be effortlessly added to Legistar.
RESULTS: AUTOMATED MEETING AND AGENDA PREPARATION
- Went from taking an average of three months to approve meeting agenda items to three weeks — a 75 percent reduction.
- With automation, county staff need to work less overtime to prepare for bimonthly meetings.
- By integrating the use of Granicus Video, the county is able to offer better indexing and search capabilities — plus, the ability to find video of previous meetings quickly. “With everything stored in the cloud, there’s no longer a risk of losing any of our archived material,” Batten said.
