Travis County Commissioners Court
June 13, 2006
Item 6
6 is to consider and take appropriate action on request regarding the implementation electronic citations (e-citations) project for Travis County including: a. Funding of $247,658 for phase one of the recommended e-citation project; b. Acceptance of a $80,060 grant from the governor's office of criminal justice planning; and c. Authorization for purchasing agent to proceed with procurements.
>> joe [indiscernible], director. Sheriff came to the its and requested that we evaluate the e citation technology in the feed today, lots of law enforcement agencies, we were lucky to have acquired bill bluitt over 10 years experience in dealing with e citation type of projects, so he did the analysis, working with the sheriff's staff. And -- and today we would like to present the -- the overall scope of the project and ask for -- for the -- to get the -- the approval to do phase 1 and to move forward with the project. We believe that it is -- that phase 1 will benefit the sheriff's office and the sheriff's staff. And then in phase 2 of the project there will be a -- a good benefit to the j.p. Courts as well. So with that, I will turn it over to bill and let bill walk through a little presentation that we have got.
>> good morning, my name is bill pluett, a project manager with the its department. And last year I was asked to review the needs and assess any citation program what it would bring the county, what benefits, what down side, what particular interfaces that projects, phases that we needed to go through. I started identified the vendors, I contacted 14 agencies in Texas and under states, their experiences with the product in the citation system. I compiled costs and did a deployment assessment of actually what we would need, what the benefit was be associated with this. Barbara and I wrote a needs assessment, identifying all of the requirements associated with the citations and the basis, I put together a quick slide overview this morning highlighting specific areas of these citation that's I -- e citations that I thought that you might find of interest. Line by line or how would you like to do it?
>> highlights.
>> highlights. The information that you think we need to know.
>> I think --
>> to make an informed decision today.
>> yes, sir. Primarily, electronic citation eliminates the ongoing data errors that we work with every day, whether it's in the field or whether it's on the rekeying of data. Through the various entities that the say thation travels in its life -- that the citation travels in its life cycle. We will prefill 90% of the existing fields of violatation so we eliminate error. You can see there are national averages for loss citations, rejection areas, et cetera, et cetera. I think the primary thing on the first slide that you would want to know is that we eliminate redundant data entry by the officer, by rms records management by the sheriff's office, in the end at the court so we prefill all of the -- all of the specific fields on a slide so that it saves f.t.e. Time, it saves redundancy, it saves errors. Moving on to the second, we do believe that this electronic citation project does provide flexibility and will save fte time resulting in lower costs when the project is complete. We will reduce the time that it takes currently for a citation to go through its life cycle from the time it's issued for the end use inventory pay or the violator to pay, can be fairly extensive, so we are eliminating that and actually under the proposed system the citation would be available to the court within 48 hours of the time that it is issued in completed form, which opportunitily takes substantially longer than that. We believe it will recognize an increase to the county in recognition because vendors, violators will be able to pay their citations promptly rather than wait.
>> so in simple english, the -- the deputy sheriff pulls over a -- a speeding vehicle, and can just walk me through that, how this -- this situation.
>> the officer pulls over a vehicle under the proposed scenario, the officer has two options. He can use a magnetic strip reader to key in, use the strip reader on the back of the license, which prefills the data. Also run a query through the state which checks and prefills all of the vehicle information. We know that that data is correct. The data, the officer if he knows where he's going to be, can preselect the location, preselect j.p. District he or she is in, when that is all complete he hits enter, the citation filled, he chooses the violation, ask the violator to sign it. We have taken all of the conversation and data entry out of it, writing, et cetera. So the officer realistically the agency that's are using it are estimating one to two minutes to swipe, return, fill, hand the citation to the violator for an electronic signature.
>> okay.
>> on your driver's license on the back, you have got all of this jazz --
>> that's 13 pieces of data, follows a national code that all states have to comply with.
>> [indiscernible] [inaudible - no mic]
>> it's been a while since I have gotten it, but it's like the handwriting. With everybody going to computers, penman ship has gone out the window. We have a lot of would-be doctors here. This says it all, you can't read it. You have something manually done, then to pick up the story, this gets turned into somebody to manually rekey it and then it will be manually rekeyed on the j.p. Office. It's like we can compress it all and here is a ticket that you can actually read.
>> one of the things that I would like to say is that my wife got a ticket back in November. And every day I知 wondering if there was a warranty out -- warrant out there, she's contacting the j.p.'s, I知 for the going to say which precinct it is in, they have not even entered the ticket from November of last year. This will -- will be able to -- once we are finished with this entire project, we will be able to send this directly to the j.p.'s.
>> one of the reasons is something was inadvertently miskeyed or something wrong on the ticket because they didn't get it right. I have gotten tickets before that -- what are they talking about? It's illegallible. Illegible.
>> the Travis County serve's 's sheriff's office on funding in the [indiscernible] assistance grant. Also prior to this went over to the criminal justice division at the governor's office and received some funding.
>> that's an --
>> $80,000.
>> thank you.
>> okay. 247 is mentioned in a. If we take 80,000 from that, that still leaves a little balance there. Where do we get the balance? Or is that the problematic part?
>> from its, computer hardware that we would need, its has $30,000 in this [indiscernible] so the 35 and the 245 make up the cost of phase 1.
>> [indiscernible] somebody be bold enough to tell us what it is. Just for the record.
>> a couple of points about correspondence. P.b.o. Has been involved with this project for the last several months and -- and our objective has been the -- to follow the guidelines of new technology requests to set out in our budget, manual that the court approvalled and we have worked with the sheriff's office, its, various other departments and -- in attempting to follow that procedure. One of the things that that procedure has done, we have been fairly adamant that when we identify savings, personnel savings, that we get the department to contribute some of those savings, either now or in the future to help offset the cost of the technology and as such we recommended in -- in randy lot's June 8th memo that -- that its identified $35,000 internally, the -- the grants, 80,000, and we recommended that there be should sharing between -- between the allocated reserve from Commissioners court, the j.p. Justice fund, and perhaps the -- the tcso justice assistance grant that I think is going to be about, you know, 200,000 or something. And some savings from the sheriff's department. That have been identified by their presentation in either increased revenue from -- from their patrol officers, having more time, obviously the time that the patrol officers expedite their driver's license swipe, they ought to be out -- out issuing more, you would think more tickets so that maybe the revenue side can come up and then there was a reference to -- to clerical staff of entering this, so we had asked the sheriff's department to participate in maybe finding some additional savings either now or once it's implemented. That was our recommendation.
>> my concern basically is since this is -- sort of like a -- I don't think it's going to -- it's not going to consume the whole [indiscernible] as far as after the -- trying to get there. Somewhere along the line, though, when we look at this, we will look at the hand held units that we are going to -- going to hopefully approve here today, but somewhere along the line there ought to be a tracking mechanism to suggest this investment save x amount of dollars, whereby be -- the -- the officers not having to spend as much time on the streets, of course the manual versus the -- versus the -- the citation, all of those things I think need to be adjusted to really see what the tree measurement of the -- of the dollars that we will be saving and of course offset the cost of investing. So I知 kind of concerned about that at what stage would those -- would those particular savings be highlighted where we at the Commissioners court can say well this was a good investment, this was a good situation for us to do, because it saved us money in the long run, made it more efficient and all of the other good things that go along with that. Somewhere along the line there ought to be some point of -- of analyzing that as the -- as these units are being -- as these hand held citation electronic citations are being utilized. Can someone maybe address when that will probably come about, those kind of savings that I just mentioned? [one moment please for change in captioners]
>> we are getting complaints on a regular basis out of east and out of west, and the traffic problems that we have out there, but I see these particular devices to be able to write the citation and move on and continue to enforce the law.
>> okay.
>> to answer Commissioner Davis' question about a day of reckoning on the results of the project. It would be our intention to work with the sheriff's office and we would bring that back to you.
>> that would be good to see.
>> the real efficiency is once facts comes up in the jp's where this electronic goes electronically into the facts system and electronically into central collections where they can monitor without human intervention. And that's where this electronic e-citations in other counties have been very effective in increasing the collection end of it.
>> okay. That's what I wanted to hear from all staff. And of course that is part of along with what you said, joe, after phase one is concluded then we'll have a lot more things that we can measure to see how effective we are as we go forward with this. So I have no problem and going to support it.
>> here are my thoughts. I知 supporting it too, like Commissioner Davis. We need a table of $363,000. Apparently we have 115. That's 80 and 35. There are several ways to generate 247. Since we have not done so already, we need written ongses with pros and cons under each one of them, that way the court can select one of them. Joe has one idea, you have another one. I don't know that the backup gives us those specific options. So why don't you give it to us in writing by next Tuesday and the court will choose one of them. How does that sound? There is a technology fund with this much money in it. That's one option. I believe there's another one. And when y'all brainstorm together, I知 sure a third one will come up. But give us whatever the options are, pros and cons on each one of them, and the court will land on one of them, unless you put your heads together and conclude that one is much, much better than any of the others. Now, I know the jp is interested in the technology fund. They will want to be assured that when they are brought on board there will be money available for their part. And I知 sure there will see work load issues, working as a team, including the court, we can all work through these issues, I知 convinced. How does that sound?
>> sounds good, your honor.
>> sounds good. I would ask one question, would it be appropriate to approve the acceptance of the 80,000-dollar grant today, though?
>> move approval.
>> second.
>> discussion? And the 35 from your shop.
>> right.
>> move approval of that too. [ laughter ] all in the same motion.
>> second.
>> all in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. So we have the 115. The challenge is to get the other -- just under $250,000. Pros and cons under each option, but if y'all agree on it, let us know that too. If there's agreement, we need to know that because we need to try to get informed, and next Tuesday we'll choose one of the options. How does that sound?
>> sounds good.
>> it makes all the sense in the world to me.
>> thank you.
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:58 AM