Travis County Commissioners Court
April 22, 2008
Item 25
>> 25 is to receive presentation on records management and communication resources department fy 2008 work plan and update.
>> the fun part. Our presentation is very visual. You received an annual work plan. On an anne out basis administrative operations departments develop work plans. Sometimes they are published, sometimes internal working documents. But it is a means to improve accountability and assure that everyone in the department knows what the goals are for that particular year and is in agreement and that then I have, along with the department director accountability from each of the division directors and their staff on what will get done. And it follows then budget and long-term planning. So I will, if we are ready, steven rowburg, I will turn it over to him.
>> good afternoon judge and Commissioners. I have a couple of housekeeping items here first. Our original presentation was over 50 minutes and my executive, alicia, said pair it down to 30. We have done that. We took out a bit of flour--flowery language. We do want you to know what it is that we do. We'd like you all to share our quiet pride in the jobs that we do. We distributed copies of our work plan document. We have more of this best seller if anybody is interested. This presentation is intended to supplement the work plan. We won't be going through it page by page with you. Instead I知 going to le all the managers talk about their respective areas of responsibility one by one. What we are going to do is give you a little bit of an overview of their operations and talk about some of the successes that they have had and giver you some of our plans for the future. We have some pictures and short videos. We're going to try to bring these operations to you today. With that we'll start with media services.
>> good afternoon, I was going say good morning but that is out. I must say I知 much more comfortable being on the back end of all this equipment. If you bear with me I値l see if you can talk to you a little bit about media services. We have been around since 1985. We have four full-time staff including three producers and the manager, myself. We operate at full service video production, audio, visual, 24-hour cable casting channel and we also starting this year stream channel 17 live to the internet. We have a short individually that we produced that should give you a brief overview of what we are doing and how we do it. If you would observe, please. . . .
>> Travis County television made its broadcast debut on a shared public access channel in 1985. Two years later due to increased demand it began broadcasting full time on its own access channel. Tctv has come a long way in 20 years. Today we are a high quality professional organization committed to delivering the best video programming possible to the residents of Travis County. Our primary mission is to televise regular voting sessions and working sessions of the Commissioners court, and any additional open meetings. Since these meetings generally take place during daytime hours, with limited parking space and a seating capacity of only 55, tctv provides a vital service for those who cannot attend these meetings. For the public's convenience, tctv not only airs the meetings live but also rebroadcasts them throughout the week on time warner change 17. Videos of Commissioners court meetings are also available on Travis County's website accessible by item. In addition to taping meetings, tctv also produces its own original public affairs programming. These productions serve to inform the public about county government. The county's primary ongoing responsibilities include the local court system, law enforcement roads and bridges, parks, and emergency services, just to name a few these productions on distributed on the website. The staff produces hundreds of hours of the programming each year, including roots which earned a spot on the best of Austin list 2006. Other productions include tax facts, on call, focus, and extension today. Tctv also produced a historical documentary called gi jose about mexican american soldiers who served in world war ii. The documentary earned a telly award. Tctv is located across from the hamen marion sweatt courthouse in the ned granger building. We are fully equipped with some of the latest technology. We have five remotely controlled tam areas in the courtroom. This allows staff to set up weekly broadcasts or meetings and press conferences at a moment's notice. Travis County has a large investment in tct v. As shown by the regular equipment upgrades. The Commissioners court has demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the station. In the last five years, tctv has nearly completed the transition to an all digital facility. Some of the more unique features of tctv include a 30 by 20 foot studio complete with green screen and virtual set technology as well as two digital edit bys which include full graphics, audio and dvd authoring capabilities. We are in an age surrounded by video. You tube, for example, is one of the fastest growing websites in the world. This video revolution is rapidly expanding into the local government sector. Travis County is ready for these exciting develop ments. We anticipate expanding our local viewing area and in the next sick months we plan to launch life video streaming of our meetings. The tctv is a committed professional organization in the access system. Thank you for your continued support.. . . . .
>> nicely done.
>> thank you. This video was produced actually last year when all the channels got together to give a presentation to the telecommunications committee down at city hall. That is why you heard in the next six months about the streaming. We have it now. It's up and running. As you saw, we produce several of our own original programs listed in the show. We also show some programs that we don't produce that we feel have information consistent with the mission of Travis County. For example, army news watch and the gd programs and several psa's, again, that we believe fall within the mission of Travis County. The run away hot lipe, illegal drug and alcohol abuse, and Texas veterans psa. We perform other services for the county dubbing services, beyond video to dvd and c d. We prepare graphics for other . We have audio visual consultant, equipment loan and coordination for other departments and we do photography. What we have accomplish '08 and '07, one of the things was Travis County tv.orgur l. The orange mall web address was kind of complicated. This one is easier to remember. You can type that in very easily. It will take you directly to the website which as you saw the button on there, it will have a button for to you pull up the live stream as we have it right now. The live stream has been up and running for a while. We think it's going to be successful because based on the information we've gotten from the videos that we have on the website so far, we've been getting quite a bit of hits on on that information. If you see there, you will see in the month of September, October, November, we regularly get six figure hits on the videos on the website right now. In November we had almost 240,000 pull downs of Travis County video. Mine --ninety percent of it was Commissioners court stuff.
>> you are much more popular than you believe.
>> we are averaging about 150 video accesses every month from the website. So we expect that the live stream will start getting as many hits once we start a small promotional campaign to let people know it's up therewe are all getting carpal tunnel hitting that but.
>> is that what is happening? Okay. What else. Okay. One other thing that we've been doing, we've been transferring all of our videotapes of the Commissioners court meetings over to dv d. We have thousands of hours of that stuff and we are doing that in cooperation with the imaging department who does all of our media transfers to digital and archive quality stuff. We are moving all those tapes over to the archive quality dvd and so far the department has been pretty successful with over a thousand hours. We have probably close to 3,000 hours remaining. They are plugging away as it probably as we speak. In the future, we want to make sure that our live stream is a hundred percent ready to be announced. We started working on it back in November. As with anything new we had to make sure that it was all working and we had to upgrade some computer equipment, work with our vendor helping us out on this. But it is working pretty well. Pretty soon we will let everyone know that it's there and that they can watch Travis County tv anywhere in the world with an internet connection now. You guys go on vacation want to see what is going on back at home, which I doubt, but you can now. We are about three quarters of the way done with our anne local log to digital conversion with our equipment. Goes without saying that analog digital is the way things are going. He don't make much of this equipment anymore that we have but we have made some significant strides. We have digital broadcast system now, play back from hard drives am we have cameras you see are digital. The switch you see is digital. We have digital audio and last week put up a digit at that time message board system. We also want to see if we can expands Travis County's footprint in central Texas and move from the analog net network to the the fiber optic gatan network, a consortium of the local governments, city and county, state of section as and university of Texas. What we want to do is eventually get all of the paid channels, public education and government channels, to consolidate at city hall where all incoming cable providers, time warner and grade are there, but any others can access all the paid channels from one location, drop it in and be ready to go and make the more likely they will be carry the channels. We want too give them at the incentive to carry so we can reach more people in the county. We also want to try to institute some internal training videos that we will put on our intranet and broadcast an our internal channel channel 13. What we have done so far, we did one on how to talk to reporters. We are still evaluating how it looks and how we should distribute it. It's not out yet but we are encouraged by what we have done so far. We have some other ideas about what we can do to help train county employees internally. That is one of the projects we want to get melted and--implemented and up and running. That is about what Travis County tv has done so far. We are really proud of what we do. We are always moving forward to make sure we stay ahead of the game with technology and training. We have a lot of support from you guys in the past and really appreciate it and with that continued support we will continue to do a good job for you.
>> thank you.
>> thanks.
>> good afternoon, judge, Commissioners.
>> good afternoon.
>> I知.
>> I知 lisa rush, of the law library. The law library has four functional areas, one purpose. To provide to Travis County lit gants. The four fupping --function the areas are the self help area and the courthouse. Reference and research in the lieu library, the information boot in the court hours and processing in granger. The work flow describes in detail the goals and accomplish mentsof each of the areas. I want to concentrate on two years today, the self help center and information boot--booth. This photo shows what the courthouse looks to us. The graphics shows what our courthouse looks to self represented lit gants. It is a maze of barrier is and questions. The self help center and the information booth are uniquely situated to help lit gants through the courthouse maze. Self represented lit gants can create confusion and reduce efficiency in the courthouse as they try to get divorced, change names or modify child support without help. The self help center was created six years ago to reduce this confusion and inefficiency caused when self represented lit gants go to uncontest the docket. I壇 like to they a video now that describes what this program has meant for the court.. . . .
>> it's my pleasure to visit with you about the self help center and the wonderful work that the reference attorneys are doing for the public in Travis County in connection with uncontested family law matters. I値l start by telling you a story about how our program got started to try to put this in con exthe. Each judge here in Travis County spends a week at a time handling uncontested matters, one docket in the morning and one in the afternoon. Before the work of the self help center and the reference attorneys began, very often the judges would be presented with orders that were just in demorable shape. The language of the orders was pretty terrible and unenforceable for the most parts. Language which did not meet the needs of children, made it very difficult for people to enforce both visitation orders as well as child support orders. That created numerous problems for families. We felt there needed to be something done about that. What we decided to do was to the assist the public in presenting court orders to the judges that were enforceable, easy to understand, that could easily be understood by people who did not have necessarily a high education level, and we thought that the way to do that was to enlist the services of attorneys who would essentially assist the court in making sure that the court's order was easily to understand and ultimately enforceable. The program has been a tremendous, let me say that again, a tremendous benefit to the citizens of our county. In the old days I would literally sit on the bench while people were waiting and waiting and waiting for me to be finished with one case while I literally crossed out unenforceable order, incomprehensible language, and rewrote those orders while people were waiting for me on the been. It was inefficientant and a waste of time , cost lawyers waiting innumerable house of wasted time that got translated to dollars and cents for the delights --the clients while they are waiting. Now that does not happen. We run an efficient uncontested docket and on these matters where. Present agreed orders to us, in some cases default orders, but in any event now we have enforceable orders easy reece and understand and are completely enforceable. It saves tile --time and money. Much more fishants. In the long run we are assisting people in getting what they need. The work of the reference attorneys has been universally accepted. It's been very successful program. We appreciate all of the support from all of the places that we have received support and ultimately the judges are quite pleased at the program's success.
>> since 2002 the center has helped over 15,000 self represented lit gants by providing forums and reference attorney to review the forms and facilitate uncontested docket. One challenge we continue to face is that self represented lit gants will go to docket before having seen the reference attorney or going to the self help centers. They may have purchased forms off the internet and forms purchased off the internet are usually not, usually do not meet the Texas requirements. The lit gant has now wasted their money and the court and the clerk's time. We want to try to reach these lit gants first. We want self represented lit gants to know that the forms which have been approved by our district judges are available for free. We want them to know there's a reference attorney available to help them. Further, we want them to know we is now have a bilingual reference attorney and forms to help lit gants who speak spanishment our main goal for the center in fy '08 is to increase community awareness of the self help centers and it forms by outreach to community groups such as churches and service organizations such as volunteer legal services. The second library function located in in the courthouse is the information boot. The information boot provides direction the information, performs notaries,er and acts at the county's phone operator. The booth answers where do I go and what is the phone number for type questions. The law library's fy '08 for the information booth is to create a quick reference website for the clerks to use to quickly access current information and maps. For in person customers the customers will be able to prints out a map or frequent ly requested question list. The clerks will be able to e-mail the list to callers. You have now heard the library's goals for fy '08. The goals reflect the library's police to provide current and accurate information in the format in which it is needed. Thank you.
>> judge, Commissioners I知 pinch hitting for recent retiree, treso howard in charge of our consulting division. This is a division with numerous statutory requirements. The state of Texas takes a high degree of interest in county records management. It has something to do with their notion that counties exist to do the state's business. But this has resulted in a near dizzying array of regulations and administrative rules that determine our directions and practices in our records endeavors. The first area, just to briefly touch on these, the first one is records retention. All records have values. Regardless of their format. They can be kept for hours or they can be kept forever. Depending upon the record itself of we assist departments to determine how long they should keep those records and how they should be managed. The second one is records destruction. I値l talk a little mere about this in our accomplish knowledge. The third is archives management. This is specialty relating to permanent and historical terms. In accomplish mentswe developed a countiwide document. Pending approval from the state it will allow is to rapidly digest some of the paper through the system. What I mean by that, oftentimes the approval for destruction, there can be, from the time that it becomes eligible to be destroyed, the approval process can sometimes be lengthy with the state. So we're trying to shore thaup a little bit. Secondly, I壇 like to talk about a new program we piloted this fiscal year that potentially replaces all of our in office shredders. These things--
>> whew ohio.
>> these.
>> these things are messing and costly and they don't did a very good job. What we piloted instead we contracted with the vend door to place secure locked bins in Travis County offices where you can place your unwanted or unneeded material. Periodically these bins are wheeled outside to a semi-truck. Inside the truck is an industrial shredder on site. We can witness the destruction. The paper is taken to a central area and mixed with other paper, bailed and recycled. This has been very well received by departments. The amount of staff saving alone for many of these departments can be significant. We don't find half shredded material in the ally anymore. It looks like a winner to us. You will be seeing some be seeing this in part of our budget. Other accomplish mentsquickly. We have collected archiving materials for the sweatt courthouse. We have continued our goals are to keep our system running in this state bureaucratic mess that we have with our report systems. There's a bunch of new regulations coming out this year. Our new, one of our new tasks is to take a stronger look at electronic records. This includes e-mail records, database records, and ensure that we are in compliance as well as to increase efficiency in determining the length of time these records need to be maintained. Lastly, we are taking another stronger look at the potential that Travis County should have an archives and archivist. In fact, I will be asking for an archivist position in the next budget cycle. Before I get the evil eye from the court members, I will point out that we have some alternative funding sources for this endeavor outside of the general fund. In conclusion, this program helps all Travis County departments stand in compliance and it increaseded the efficiency and effectiveness of offices through management of their records. Thank you.
>> kevin orange, imaging division, located on airport boulevard consists of eight fte's and performs media conversion services for departments. The way information is packaged, hard drive, cd, dvd, videotape, et cetera. Some of the media we convert is paper to digital and microfilm to digit talge. The paper to digital consists of paper projects and regularly scheduled . A couple of examples are the scanning of the returned voter registration cards and scanning and up loading to the web of the campaign finance filing. Con ver gance of microfilm to digital has become a large part of the operation over the last few years. The county has a huge amount of documents on microfilm. Although it's still the media of choice throughout the world it can be cumbersome. Counties are enabling the customers easy and fast access to the archive documents. We scan and index at a cost efficient manner. Private sector may be able to do the job faster but they can't do it cheaper than we can. The imaging division performs media conversion from paper to microfilm and digital images to microfilm. The Travis County produces many records that require a permanent retention. The best way to preserve is to use archive quality microfilm. There is a growing trend for jobs requiring the creation of archival microfilm from scanned images which we can do with the archive writer. Images consulting services is another task we perform. The division offers help in developing images system both large and small in countiwide. We work closely with with its and other departments. The net result of this consulting work is the various departments and the public get the information they need faster, more economically and with proper oversight. We do costing models to determine whether the county office, my office or an outside contractor is the best option. We also help in the selection of imaging equipment and scanners. Some key accomplish mentsin fiscal year '07 were the con version of over a thousand hours of Commissioners court work and voting sessions from deteriorating video type to dvd for archives. And district clerk civil and criminal minutes microfilm to put into document management system. The public and county personnel will be able the look the records up on the computer. Where it take 15 minutes to reference a document now takes seconds. One of our goals for fiscal year '08 is to continue the multiyear project of scanning and indexing of the district clerk civil and criminal minutes microfilm in the document imaging system. The second goal for the imaging division is to identify records that are currently stored off-site and are good candidates for document conversion to digital or microfilm. We will also be looking for the records that if digitized will benefit the county the most considering efficiency, county operations and fiscal concerns. Third goal for fiscal year '08 is to add minister the jp morgan chase scanning and indexing of 60,000 boxes of district court file records. This represents approximately 28 million images. The project will result in a savings of approximately $50,000 per year. To conclude, it is important to note that this program started about 20 years ago simply as a microfilm shop and has transitioned into a multimedia conversion services lab. The constant search for the best value technology combined with getting the most out of what we have has enabled the division to remain come pet thetive with the private sector. Thank you.
>> good afternoon, I知 tom ash burn, manager of support services. Support services consists of four divisions, eve an essentially budgeted resource managed to serve all county departments. We are not the glamourous divisions but essential to the day-to-day business of the county. First up off-site storage where we oversee the management of 145,000 boxes of county records stored oversite. We use--off-site. We use the state contract structured so that records will inexpensive to store but they can be expensive to recall. A key accomplishment last year, we identified ways in the contract to increase efficiency by bundling orders and combining pick-up. We reduced expenses over $20,000 from previous year. That translates to a six percent increase in inventory but a four percent expense reduction. Our goal for this year is to increase the destruction of records that have met their retention requirements. The state requires several levels of approval in order to destroy records. Working with the straight library, we believe we worked through these to destroy records on a more timely basis. Our second goal originally in the work plan was to provide a solution to the access issues as they relate to records stored off-site. Based on our recent conversations with the county attorneys and the sheriffs compliance team, the issues appears to be re. Next is mail services. Originally designed to server a compact down taken calm pass has been forced to adapt to the county moving functions away from downtown and adding new building to serve. Example, in 1949 we made 40 mail stops. Today we make 70. That's a 49 percent increase, and we have not added any staff or vehicles. A key accomplishment for us has been the contracting for large mail-outs. Jury summons, voter registration, monthly building statements are now prepared and made off-site. This savings the county labor. The mailings are prepare by the contractor with a maximum postage discount answer these things no longer swamp out the mail room. Our goal for this year is to consolidate the various accounts and permits that the county holds with the united states post office. These range from bulk mailingmail permits, business reply permits, po box rental, and the post office requires to you maintain separate balances for each mailing permit or business reply permit. They won't trans fer between them. It's very inefficientants. The county is a challenge. Since the account added the ability for funds transfer we can set up an account with the post office which will streamline cash fro as all the transactions histories are available on line. Copier services. We currently rent 207 copiers off state contract. This is very efficient. Both the toner and maintenance are included in the rental. Our accomplishment is the conversion from analog to digital of the copiers. Since 2005 we have increased that from five percent to 82 percent with minimal increases in funding. Now, this presents an opportunity and leads into our goal which is to complete the conversion to digital copiers. These machines have the ability to function as fax machines, laser printers and scanners. The county spends a significant amount of money toner for fax machines and their maintenance. These machines can be networked and take the place of these and offset those expenses. Our goal for this year is to work with its to install as many of those where they make sense. Lastly, we have the print shop where we perform all manner of copying, printing and bine ready for all county offices. In addition we deliver copy paper to all the offices. Lasttively year we produced over 17 million impressions. The majority of those are three and four part forms used by the sheriffs office, our largest customer three times over the next department. In orders to best use these resources, we review our production to locate economics of scale and opportunities. We survey local printers to price these forms and found we produce them for 20 percent of market price. Some of this is due to the fact that we can buy paper off the state contract, although we found even in we provided them the paper we were still at one thirds of what we would be charged if we used a commercial printer. Copying was also surveyed and we came out 30 percent less than the commercial copy shops on apples the apples comparison. A key accomplishment, since 2003 we increased output 22 percent without increase in operating budget. We created efficiencies in purchasing and supply inventory and invested in better equipment of our goal for this year is to get a handle on our demand and the growth and assess our capacity for the next five to seven years. Since 1999 the print shop has increased output 84 percent, and each year we are asked on produce more than we did the last year. So we are going to try to get a handle on the direction of this and apply our resources accordingly. In conclusion, we demonstrated an ability even with an old guard fuppings here to successfully adapt to a changing county business environment. And focus on the efficient and cost effective use of our labor and resources.
>> thank you. In conclusion, we tried to give y'all a sense of what these operations look like and what they do. I hope you will be left with an agreement of mind that we have a strong and vital group of managers here and their advanced result in outstanding work. I think it's important to note behind these managers there are a number of staff who work hard every day. I heard from many of them, and they were genuinely excited by the opportunity for you Commissioners court, to see what it is that they do. They are proud of their work and I think justifiably so. I壇 also like to give a special thanks to dale cornaby sitting here at the table who put together our multimedia presentation, media services. That concludes my presentation. Thank you very much, judge and Commissioners.
>> thank you all. Questions?
>> no, thank you very much.
>> special thanks for uploading the county ordinances, the county code and that project is moving along and I really appreciate it. Y'all do just an incredible work.
>> thank you.
>> thank you all.
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.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, April 23, 2008 8:51 PM