Orange Beach Goes Hi-Tech

Everyone now has access to what's happening with the City of Orange Beach. For people like you who are reading this Blog you now will have access to the documents, agenda, etc on-line. The city is going paperlesss.

Wednesday, January 04, 2006
By RYAN DEZEMBER
Staff Reporter

ORANGE BEACH -- It used to be that anyone who wanted to study the budget, see how much the city was paying for concrete, read minutes of a past council meeting, or view records surrounding development proposals, had to go to City Hall and ask for the documents, and perhaps pay for copies.

Now those records and just about all of the other documents elected officials view before making decisions and casting votes are available online to anyone who desires to delve into the details of Orange Beach's government.

In a move to save time and trees and eliminate unwieldy stacks of records, the city has gone paperless in all of its documents that relate to City Council meetings. Laptop computers have replaced the files council members and city officials shuffled through at meetings, reporters can download only the documents they need rather than receiving a bulky packet, and residents can do the same without a trip to City Hall.

The information is available from the Web site www.cityoforangebeach.info.

The notion to go paperless arose when council members complained last year about the volume of paper they had to keep at their homes -- records and documents associated with all manner of municipal business from development plans to city department reports and bid sheets.

Councilwoman Tracy Holiday said recently that the old way of maintaining paper files was cumbersome and "a waste of paper."

The new system is more efficient and effective, she said. Elected officials can access and view records at any time from any place and constituents with questions can be easily directed to the appropriate documents, Holiday said.

"We should have done it a while ago," she said.

City Administrator Jeff Moon said that he was able to review and approve the items proposed for a recent council meeting from the Sportsplex -- which is a wireless Internet hot spot -- while attending the SEC women's soccer tournament.

"If I'm traveling on a business trip, I can log on from anywhere in the world and create an agenda item or do my approval process or look and see what's on the agenda," Moon said.

Using two private Web sites to create the agendas and keep track of supporting documentation, the process of putting together a council meeting has been streamlined, with much of the work being done at the click of a mouse, Moon said.

Also, he said, the time and effort involved in putting together packets full of paperwork for council members, department heads and reporters before each week's meetings is eliminated.

"It was a tremendous amount of staff time put into creating them," he said. "Likewise, there was a tremendous amount of cost being put into creating it, from the copying costs to the staff time."

Though it wasn't the impetus for going online, Moon said the biggest boon of the new system is that a tremendous amount of information now becomes easily accessible to the public.

"The public has access to the same documents the council does, whether it be a draft ordinance, a draft resolution, or a memo or any of the supporting documentation, whereas before the public didn't have access to that unless they came in and specifically requested it," Moon said. "They now have access on the Web to everything that staff and council does, so that, at the end of the day, is probably one of the most important things."

Only documents that otherwise would not be public, such as those pertaining to personnel or legal matters, are not available on the public Web site, Moon said.

As early as Friday the agenda for Tuesday's meeting was posted at the Web site. Though agendas were always published on the city's Web site, residents can now glean more information about what will go on than the short descriptions traditionally available.

According to the agenda the council was set to vote on a resolution to appoint members to the Construction Board of Adjustment and Appeals. By clicking on an icon next to that item, a copy of the proposed resolution could be downloaded to see that the council was specifically set to vote to appoint Danny Duke and Larry Alexander to four-year posts on the board.

Or say someone wanted to know who won a contract to supply the city with sod for the upcoming year and how elected officials made that decision at their Dec. 20 meeting.

According to the online minutes and of that meeting, Holiday made a motion, which Councilman Jeff Silvers seconded, to give the contract to Cleverdon Farms of Foley. That motion passed, according to the minutes, and by downloading the supporting documentation from the agenda, it could be learned that the Cleverdon gave better prices on three varieties of grass than did competitors Craft Farms and Woerner Turf.
To set up this system, Orange Beach paid $26,000 for the needed software and it will cost $3,000 annually to pay MCCi, the Tallahassee, Fla., company that developed the program, to host the Web site that stores the information online, Moon said. MCCi is a subsidiary of the Municipal Code Corp., which catalogs the city's ordinances online and on paper.

In addition, the city also had to buy eight $900 laptop computers for council members -- the mayor uses his personal computer -- and city officials to use during the meetings, Moon said. And a ceiling-mounted projector and wall screen, which are used to display the agenda and documents in the council chambers, was also purchased and installed for about $7,500, but Moon said that was going to be bought to replace an old projector regardless of the switch to an online system.

"When you look at the cost of the copies and the paper and the staff time creating them, I think over a couple of years it will more than pay for itself on the financial end," Moon said. "You can't really put a dollar value on the amount of access the public has to information more easily now, but on just the pure dollars and cents, I think it will more than pay for itself in the long haul."


And if the laptops malfunction, servers crash or Internet access is interrupted?

"You always run that risk if something happens but we have the ability, if needed, to create a paper packet," Moon said.

ON THE NET

Orange Beach City Council packets:

cityoforangebeach.info