Wildomar Council Will Switch To iPads
Wildomar City Council members will stop printing paper agendas and make the switch to viewing agendas and minutes on tablet computers come Jan. 1, 2012.
Shiny touch-screen tablets dot the Wildomar City Council dais at meetings now.
The iPad devices--a line of wildly successful tablet computers sold by Apple--will soon replace hefty 100-page-plus binders that city staff have long labored over before each meeting, Council decided on Wednesday.
The move is expected to save the cash-strapped city nearly $4,800 yearly in paper purchases and staff time spent copying and collating agendas.
"It's a little bit difficult and a little bit scary to think we're going to go just to this," said Mayor Marsha Swanson, who uses an iPad in her job at Coldwell Banker. "There may be a learning curve for everyone."
Council members and staff will use both iPads and paper agendas while they learn the ins-and-outs of the tablets. They will switch to digital-only meetings on Jan. 1.
Cities across the country have been moving en-masse to the pricey hand-held computers. Murrieta council members have already ditched their binders and made the jump.
Two council members own and use iPads for personal or business reasons, allowing the city to switch to the new system without having to shell out $3,650 for five new devices. Public Works Director Tim D'Zmura's Interwest Consulting Group will donate three late-model iPads for the remaining representatives.
Wildomar will pick up a roughly $20-per-month tab for mobile data plans on each of the three donated iPads.
City staff are expected to purchase their own devices if they choose to use them. They run about $729 each for a mid-range model that can download files over WiFi and mobile networks. An additional charge of $20-per-month is required to pay for an on-the-go data plan.
The switch is "basically to be more efficient," City Clerk Debbie Lee said. "It's also to help in conservation with less paper we're going to be using, and less use of the copy machine that we have all come to know and love dearly."
Lee said she spends four hours or more each week preparing the paper agendas.
"It really got mind boggling when I got into this and started running the numbers and realized we're using almost 10 boxes of paper a year," she said. "That's a lot."
Physical copies of meeting agendas and minutes will still be available to the public, officials said, allaying concerns that those without technical savvy would be kept from viewing city documents. Wildomar's attorney stressed that, in keeping with public records laws, printed minutes would still be kept in city records lockers.
"While I think this is fine for the council, I want to make sure we will still be producing paper documents for the public so they are available (for) those who still want to see the paper and touch it," City Attorney Julie Biggs said.
Mayor Pro Tem Ben Benoit, a professed techie and longtime iPad user, will host a training seminar later in the year to help staff adapt to the tablet programs used to view documents. The meeting will be open to the public.
Benoit, who serves on numerous committees, boards and regional governance groups, said that toting around his iPad was markedly easier than dragging massive binders to each meeting.
"I would literally have a stack of agenda items this big," he said, spreading his thumb and pointer finger as wide as they would go.
But concerns remain over the intersection of public and private use of the iPads. Public records laws mandate that documents and communications viewed by politicians and city staff on government-sponsored computers be made available to the public when requested.
For council members who compose business emails on their tablets, or who chat with family and friends on devices they own, this legal quandary could lead to unnecessary and annoying leaks of personal information.
The question of whether personal communications transmitted to or from city officials' iPads will be available to the public hasn't been answered by the courts.
"I would hope the law would be on the side of only disclosing city documents," and not personal items, Benoit said.
Evan
1:09 pm on Thursday, September 15, 2011
Your average agenda is 40 pages. Therefore your print roughly 4000 pages of documents for your city council agendas a year. How does that equal $4800 in cost a year? I average 10,000 documents a year for my business and the cost is roughly $200 for ink/paper. Are you having your agendas printed by a professional photo lab? It doesn't surprise me that the interwest government contract wants to provide three iPad's. Sounds like a kick-back to me.... Do the taxpayers in Wildomar need to pay for a part-time council member's full-time network access to the At&T DATA PLAN monopoly. If the only reason in getting ipad's is network access to pdf documents, I regret to inform you there are more cost effective measures. You can equip your council tables with low cost monitors. Connect the monitors to a server, then have the server distribute the documents to the monitors. This process is available as FREE software and the hardware cost about the same as ONE ipad. With no monthly costs. But if you absolutely need an expensive iPad for your sunday coffee and news reading, then purchase the WiFI only model. That way you can also play angry birds and update facebook while some disgruntled citizen is speaking at the podium. USE YOUR EXISTING INTERNET connection in city hall to retrieve documents by wifi. Perhaps the money can be better spent on effective law enforcement (one deputy at night currentley) or help pay for the parks.
Elsinore Watcher
1:57 pm on Thursday, September 15, 2011
Well thought out and constructive response Evan... It amazes me how these city governments continue to waste our money and try to pull the wool over our eyes!!
Michelle Deskin
3:32 pm on Thursday, September 15, 2011
Evan,
You can balk all you want, however these are the good points:
1. Companies are already using this paperless means of sending invoices to us to pay
2. The tablets are paid for. So, no one can give Wildomar City Council anything that would help them?
3. You must have a 1 of a kind printer! Our printer at home uses over $120.00 EACH TIME I HAVE TO REFILL THE CARTRIDGES!!!! THE INK ONLY SUPPORTS BETWEEN 400-500 COPIES EACH CARTRIDGE, IT SAYS SO ON THE BOX...
4. If the council members have meetings off site to go to, then they will need to carry the infomation they need that would be in the binder.
5. Cities in Riverside County don't usually put parks in their budget. That miniscule $22.00 a YEAR, that is less than going to McDonald's for a family of 4 adults, people didn't want to invest that small ammount monthly, why????
6. Sprint, Verizon, etc... all have wirelss plans & maybe they get a special government rate
7. There is no way to please everyone. You have to look at the big picture, not just what you & a few cranky people want.
Technology is everywhere!!! You can't sit back on your hanches & do nothing.... We want to stay up to speed, be competitive, and bring larger business, as well as small businesses to our city. That takes technology they are currently using from where they came from to our wonderful city. I for one think their doing a great job & they all have regular jobs outside of City Council jobs....
Martha L. Bridges
7:14 am on Friday, September 16, 2011
I have no objection to the city's expanded use of the technology. However, there are risks and concerns about iPad use that remain unaddressed. One more time Wildomar is rushing into a decision without laying the necessary foundation of policy before spending more taxpayers' money.
1. The city is already paying for internet access on council's smartphones, so they are duplicating costs with the iPad connectivity.
2. The estimated savings is, as usual, overstated to hoodwink the public.
3. The city needs to develop well thought out policies for mixing personal and city data on the same device. Policies must be the same for all councilmembers. It's a bad idea for some of them to use their own iPad. Ownership of the devices and all the data on them should clearly be the property of the city.
4. The law is clear about records needing to be kept, and the public being able to get copies of those records. There are already serious concerns about serial calls, emails and meetings between councilmembers in violation of the Brown Act.
5. The parks funding issue has nothing to do with this article/subject. Your statements are simplistic and out of context, the yearly cost you quoted is understated, and the major objections to the parks assessment had nothing to do with the cost.
6. iPad use won't enhance being competitive or bringing any new business to the city. They're just another expensive perk! As to this council doing a great job - LOL and get real.
UNCLE FESTER
9:10 am on Sunday, September 18, 2011
i have this rare, hardly used, extra clean toilet seat for sale... it will cut cost, use less paper, needs no batteries, doesnt require updates, an "i.t. guy" , does not need ink, and best of all---IT WILL SIT IN ONE SPOT, NOT GET LOST OR STOLEN, AND IT WILL TAKE OR LISTEN TO ALL THE SH*T YOU WANNA FEED IT!" ... are you kidding ? i pads ? what are you 14 ? isnt there anyone listening out there ? the services are there to use if you set it up right. there should be no added cost or anything else that can be so easily "misplaced, stolen or broken" as I-pads... by the way, what will you do when these i-pads are outdated ? ( which in reality happens about every 10 to 30 days?) then what ? 3 more newest editions...?" you want an i-pad ? you buy it !!! im betting if you have to buy it yourself, it wont get lost, broken or magically worn out....... pay attention to the other statments above... dont spend what you cant afford . even it YOU might think youre saving money---you're not... water the parks !!!