Travis County Commssioners Court
February 18, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 34
Now, before lunch we indicated that we would call up item no. 34. Recall this this morning. 34. Take up at 1:40 p.m. Discuss and take appropriate action on issues regarding the discretionary indigent defense grant proposal.
>> good afternoon. I was going to say I know that I'm not alone on this.
>> thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to be here this afternoon. Let me tell you what's going on. Judge Biscoe, commissioners, as you all are aware, keenly aware, senate bill 7 has come into effect over the last couple of years, we have diligently worked towards making sure that we have a good process, so that we can get the people in jails afforded their counsel quickly and processed quickism one of the things that came to our attention in order for us to actually become actively involved with senate bill 7, getting those appointments on and complying with all of it, was that we were given an opportunity to participate in a grant. And at that grant talked about trying to electronically enhance our capability of complying with senate bill 7 and processes fromhe intake of our court system. As you know right now everything is done manually, I believe pretrial services who is here, has had to go to the sheriff's office and the jail, look up prisoners, trying to do their paperwork to try to get them eligible. And then come back down. They then calculate the processes for whether they fit the membership requirements on their income to be given an attorney. That gets handed down to mr. Hail for the criminal courts, she has to process that. Then we get the paperwork ready and ship out the appointments. One of the ideas in this grant was to automate that process and to try to give us a streamlined situation so that we can quickly process these appointments. The grant that we have been offered and awarded actually is $150,000. What we are here today to do is ask us with you whether you think that is something that this county wants to participate in. We have started this process, the reason that I'm kind of involved is that juvenile court, because we do cases under the "criminal quasi criminal areas" are also required to participate in senate bill 7. The most of these cases that we are looking at for the process of this grant is adult criminal court, because juvenile is such a small portion of the attorneys' fees. This rils towards the adult system. But because I was involved in the senate bill 7 recently I kind of worked with everybody here, got everybody on board. Nowlin from its worked so much with us, deborah hale in pretrial services, we have come up with a proposal that we would like for you to consider for this grant. This proposal is accept the $150,000 grant to automate the process, the sheriff's office has been extremely cooperative in providing space to put a computer terminals, pretrial services would access the inmates so that the information can be down loaded into computers. We would have prefilled I believe it's called areas in the computer so that these matters would eventually go into the new system, I believe, is that right, joe? It's a really interesting process to automate this. Then the data would then be sent to deborah hale automatically as well. And then she would also do fax notification to attorneys so that we get information to these appointed attorneys quicker. For those people who are going to go ahead and bond out of jail quickly, they will still be processed as quickly. For those persons who would not be getting out on personal bond, but would need an attorney to go for a hearing, we are hoping to expedite that process through this because we will get quicker notifications for the attorneys. This is a grant that is an up front grant. What I mean is that the county actually has to front the money, get the refund from them I think on a quarterly basis. It is going to be that way. What I have asked everybody to talk about here what cost to the county, what enhancement for the county, whether or not there would be ongoing costs if the grant does not continue. It is a one-time grant. Initially they said if we actually were able to automate and show that we had good measures out of this, that they might give us another grant. As you know in this times of the budget with the state, I would not necessarily think that that's going to happen, anything that we do, I think that we need to understand that it may be a one-time up front cost that they are talking about to bite equipment. But the automation of this process. I want to tell you that its stepped up with an incredible amount of support on this and actually have taken over a big lead. I'm going to turn it over to nolan, joe, whoever would like to talk about this process as to what it means to the county, whether or not they want to do and participate. My biggest push for this is to tell you if you want to do it. I think it's a positive way of implementing an expedited process for getting the attorneys appointments done efficiently and effectively. You are going to have less fountain manual error on trying to identify whether or not somebody actually is eligible under the income area to be appointed an attorney. So we will also hopefully we believe enhance the ability that we would have to use our staff more efficiently and effectively throughout all of the departments. Bhaws you hopefully will -- because you hopefully will streamline the need for the staff to be running all over the place to get and process this data. I'm going to turn is over to nolan giving you some handouts. Also thank everybody who participated in this process from deborah kitchens who retired about two years ago and come back.
>> she never retires.
>> all others who continue to work with us. So ...
>> nolan is passing out a project scope and project benefits for each one of the departments that the gentleman has discussed. That the judge discussed from pretrial to administration area. I will let him talk a little bit about what those benefits are. And the budget we passed out is a little over the grant of 150, but its can fund the difference out of our contingency funds that you allowed to us have for management discretion this last budget period. So we feel like we can cover the difference there. The front end of the project. I will let nolan describe a little bit about the benefit that's we think the county is going to get from this.
>> certainly as judge muir mentioned, [inaudible], this really is a combined effort between multiple dements. We expect to see benefits for each of those for pretrial services, criminal courts, administration, the sheriff's office, county auditors and ultimately the defendants that are in our system and as well the defense attorneys that are appointed to represent them. Senate bill 7 as the judge mentioned, put several requirements upon the counties to -- to respond in a -- in a shortened time frame and although we are currently meeting those, we are still having to do that in a paper manual process. So this project, the purpose of this project really allows Travis County to implement technology that would streamline that process and ensure that we are able to comply with the shortened time frames and really manage the data in a more responsible manner. As joe mentioned the grant covers the implementation of the technology, design of the application system that aloss us to do those things, to allow us to manage that data electronically. Prefill information and pass it along from the intake of pretrial services to criminal courts administration. But it would also allow us to address some of the infrastructure items. As judge muir mentioned, the end point, the intake points of entry for this process is the pretrial services interview. Currently, that is being done by pretrial services officer that's have to roam around the central booking area. They currently don't have a dedicated area that allows them to conduct the interviews. As part of this discuss and plan for this project, that was one of the things that was identified, the sheriff's office was brought in. They were able to immediately kind of respond and assist us with that item in terms of identifying some areas that can be set aside for these -- for dedicated work areas and interview areas for pretrial services. While this project is centered in terms of technology and is being managed and led by the technology side of things, there are certainly an investment and benefits we expect to see on the frufer side -- infrastructure side in terms of being able to pay for like I said the dedicated areas, cabling that's going to be available for the work areas as well. We expect to see benefits for pretrial, criminal courts administration, sheriff's office will have an easier time in terms of having these dedicated areas by allowing us to put the pretrial services officers and bring the defendants to them as opposed to having the pretrial services officers have to roam out and interview them. Auditor's office we will expect to see a better capability in terms of audit time and audit process related to the indigent form. When they've had audits in the past, they've had to go out and roam across the county. Some of the items may be stored off-site. So by us electronically managing and storing that data it's going to be a lot easier to audit and address that information. Ultimately, in terms of what the purpose and the goal of the grant is, it's to provide a better quality of service to the defendants that are indigent. And require court appointment. Those are -- that kind of really addresses some of the benefit that's we have outlined on the project benefits. The project scope essentially lists at a high level some of the project tasks that we have identified that the point in time. We've had some up front discussions in meetings. We are in the process, kind of putting together the core project team and we will be moving forward, laying out a more defined project definition plan. The sheet that we have before you really covers some of the high level tasks as well as the output deliverables that we expect to see as part of the project. The third item that we distributed to you is the indigent defense grant budget as joe and judge muir mentioned that the am low indicated amount from the state of Texas defense task force is 150,000. The difference of 50,753 is really in two areas. Contingency funds that we just identified from an it perspective that any time that we go into a project, it's important to set some contingency funds for unforeseen items that may occur. Additionally, 8,000 is set up really in reserve to handle additional equipment that we are first going to evaluate. One of the core components in terms of the indigent defense forms that's part of the process is capturing the signature from the defendants. So one of the things that we are actually looking at incorporating this project that would also have benefits outside of this project for future of criminal justice projects is a digit tall signature pad. So we are as part of the grant budget we are purchasing and evaluating one unit for that purpose. If that goes well and we are able to fully implement that technology into the application, we have set aside an additional $8,000 that would cover the full scale implementation, for that purpose for those additional signature pads. [one moment please for change in captioners]
>> primarily designed and implementation on our side, that is really a cost that we are going to incur during the year one, in terms of time spent on developing and implementing the project. We are actually potentially getting salary reimbursement as part of that. What's listed as personnel and fringe benefits. Long term there would be additional time spent by personnel maintaining, adding additional function ality. The grant would also -- would include the purchase of the servers and the -- maintenance agreements that would cover up to about five years, realistically speaking we are not seeing any additional costs for years two through five, potentially, you know, between years five and 10, that we might look at upgrading the servers for additional functionality. [one moment please for change in captioners] my biggest questions is we've had some problems related to our biggest funds of getting our money out of the state in a timely manner. And so I would want to know specifically what's in the grant provisions about when they are supposed to upon the receipt of -- of you know the appropriate documentation of how many days they have got to turn it around, we have tremendous problem with secretary of state's office in terms of getting our money out of the primaries. And it -- it hit over into a new fiscal year, so I'm thinking ahead on some of these things, especially when we are dealing with an entity that is having issues related to budget that we don't get ourselves out there and then all of a sudden, we don't get the rei am yourselfment that we had anticipated -- reimbursement that we had anticipated they go we are really, really sorry, but we don't have a document that protect the county.
>> the grant agreement that we have does specify that we have to submit a progress report as well as the date that -- the distribution on a quarterly basis.
>> it's going to be real important for the county attorney's office to look at those kinds of things to protect the county.
>> I spliem wanted to make sure that the court knew what was going on, what we were looking at, whether or not you were interested in receiving that grant because we are a little late, they are actually voting off, so if the court is interested, we will put it back on to actually approve the contract next week in order to kind of get this done, if you are interested in us going ahead to proceed with it.
>> we give our attentive approval.
>> second.
>> subject to an appropriate contract being presented next week.
>> yes, sir.
>> all right. Any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote.
>> thank you.
>> thank you all very much.
Last Modified: Wednesday, April 2, 2003 10:25 AM