2011-01-14 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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attitudinal or behavioral issues that underlie some of the problems that we have here on the financial front. And that is why as it seems we decided to look at what services the county is really responsible for providing. What are essential services? And perhaps some of the services that we are currently providing are not essential and should not be provided especially in tough budget times as we face today. So thank you for bringing that forward cause we have looked at that as well as a theme. We also have identified some overarching policy issues, most of which you touched upon. One of which was the contracting process. And we did have presentation by the Procurement Division and others on the contracting process, and looking at the inefficiencies that occur because of the type of process that we are using. And I’m not referring just to the fact that we have to abide by state law, just the inefficiencies of our internal processes and the result in change orders and contracts that do not get renewed on time, other types of lapses. We also see as an overarching policy issue of collection and fees. And we had good presentation by the Real Property Tax office and others on our collections there, real property taxes being the majority of the funds that we receive to conduct business as a government. We have some recommendations moving forward there that I would like to ask you about and your opinion about. Then the third overarching policy issue is this technology plan, countywide technology plan. There are so many technologies within the county, and agencies are not talking to each other. Departments are not talking to each other. We’re not talking to the public, interfacing with the public well. We, as a county, do not have a countywide technology plan and that could enhance our abilities to collect revenues. It could enhance our efficiency interacting with the public and it might be able to allow us to function better with perhaps elimination of these vacant funded positions if we have better technology available to us and our staff is trained in that technology. So those are the three overarching policy issues that we’ve identified. And then as a commission we have created some subcommittees, focus areas, one being Operations, Budget and Consolidation of departments. And we’re looking at some things such as perhaps consolidating enforcement into its own department which in turn creates better efficiencies and perhaps increases fees that we recover. We also have a subcommittee on Revenue Enhancement and Collections. And we have a subcommittee on Technology Recommendations. So this is how this committee has been looking at the issue of cost of government. We’re not just focused on crunching numbers in the budget, eliminating positions and that sort of thing. We’re trying to take a broader focus to see how government can change behaviorally that attitude of, this is the way we’ve done it, and this is the way we’re going to continue to do it. That does need to be addressed. And also efficiency. How can we operate more efficiently? So that’s what we’ve been looking at. So getting back to MR. HOFFMANN: Can I just make a comment before I forget it. There was another one liner I had here in my notes and I failed to mention it. Consolidating. And you mentioned it when you said enforcement. I thing there’s a need to look at the possibility of consolidation of functions and the admin functions and some others that are, I think, could be consolidated among various departments. I don’t mean to say we need to end up with the old idea of a stenography pool. But the idea of trying to consolidate functions that are common to all departments, I think there’s more in there than I think that could be looked at. I don’t know of any effort that, and this is not my idea, I must tell you, I’ve been approached by a couple of people, residents in my district, business people, retired, and say they’ve achieved significant results. And believe it or not, an 9