Travis County Commissioners Court
August 19, 2008
Item 25
>> 25 is to consider and take appropriate action on request for additional resources for the November 4, 2008 presidential election, including the need for additional temporary personnel and election equipment.
>> good afternoon, judge and Commissioners. Dana debeauvoir, Travis County clerk. If it please the court, I do have some sheets for you all to follow for today's discussion. I've been working with your facilities management department and alicia for a couple of other departments including its, there are some of the items that we wanted to consider using for this presidential election, that are going to be able to be handled within the budget of those departments so I'm not going to have to bring you any kind of a problem that needs to be solved with that. Everything that we are doing we are able to work out among ourselves. For example the facilities management department is also providing us with a -- with a -- with a generator for the early voting location at 5501, they can could that within their budget. Its is adding phone lines for both a regular call center and our fail safe call center. They are going to be able to absorb that. The only thing that I would need from the court today is an indication for permission for them to move forward on those smaller ticket items. And then what I would like to do is talk to you briefly about -- about the kinds of proposals that we are working on right now. This is the initial briefing. I plan to come back to you next Tuesday with all of the final numbers, but this gives us an opportunity to talk about it in public in advance very quickly. I'm not going to take up too much of your time. All right. The first problem that I let the court know about we had an issue with fail safe, with all of the jurisdictions that were going to be participating in the November election, plus the extraordinary volume that we are anticipating for November. We guessed what we would need for fail safe. Since that initial proposal, we have had a few of our jurisdictions not participate in the November election. And I really just hammered with the secretary of state's office exactly what is required in law for us to do, fail safe, so that we do no more than what is required and yet we meet our obligation. As a result of those two actions we have been able to significantly reduce the request to you to cover a fail safe voting call center. I'm only going to ask next week for funding for a third of what I had initially asked. I had initially asked for 158,000, I'm -- I'm now going to ask closer to 60,000, so that's -- that's -- that's significantly less and I'm pleased that we were able to whittle that down. It took a lot of work on a lot of people's parts. I do think that we are going to see an enormous turnout. Based on the previous statistics and I have those at hand in case you would like to know what they are. I don't think it's at all unreasonable for us to expect approximately 340 or so thousand people to vote in the November election. We will be doing an effort to push early voting. If we are successful, fortunate, if we are really lucky 60% of our voting will take advantage of early voting. That means that to -- that the number of people that we are trying to push through the 12 hours on election day is closer to 250,000. Which is a much more doable kind of situation. We don't want the election day to be so -- so crowded with voters that people have to wait an inordinate amount of time. Everybody understands a few minutes, half an hour, something like that is going to happen. But two or three or four hours is absolutely not -- we don't think that's reasonable. That's what we are trying to avoid. In order to avoid that, though, and to beef up early voting, we're making some changes to take advantage of the existing resources and the existing budget. But my proposal will ask for all of our current early voting locations, we are going to rearrange some of the use of the mobile voting locations to shore up the permanent locations when they go into their last three or four or five days, especially that last day. We can use our mobile teams to provide extra support to the places where we know those crowds are going to pile up. We are doing that. What I'm asking the court to consider is what we would call adding a mega site. A mega site is a center that might have as many as 35, 40, even 50 voting booths in one place with lots of good parking so that people can come in and it's like a big box approach. We felt it was reasonable to do a proposal that asks for one location north and one location south. The north one we have been able to solve very quickly and easily with pretty minimal expense. The chair king next door to our 5501 airport boulevard can serve as that kind of a mega site. It will be perfect, in my prediction -- and my prediction is that will be heavily used and that people will be very grateful for it. We also felt like we needed to have a location south as well. It has been much more difficult to find one. I believe that I have everything all in place now. Excuse me. To say that we can offer another mega site in south Austin near westgate. Near the westgate theater, westgate mall. We're working out the final details on that, but it's about 3,000 square feet of commercial space that is going to be partly donated and partly it will be an expense to Travis County to have that. If you can bear with the brokers that are working on this, we should have our numbers together in the next day or two, and I will bring them to you as soon as I have them. We could be looking at a rental for the south mega site center of approximately $5,000 for the rental of the space for the early voting period. But before I get too far down that road, I'm really prepared next week to give you all of those details. I just wanted you to know that I'm working on this proposal because I think that we're going to have to have some kind of way to draw the volume down from some of -- especially some of our more heavily used early voting locations. If we have a mega site at -- at airport boulevard and then a mega site south and then we beef up the location for -- for early voting at the ben hur shrine temple which replaced northcross mall, in close proximity to that area, another one at the carver library museum, I think that we will have hit the major areas where I think that we could get really inundated with crowds. I think that will be -- I don't want to -- to imply to anyone that there will not be lines. There will be lines, especially in rush hours. What we're trying to do is keep those at a minimum and offer people the chance to go someplace else if their time just doesn't afford for them to wait in line at their first choice of a location they showed up to. Okay. In order for us to be able to operate these two mega sites, 5501 airport and westgate tower, I need about 85 more e slates and 11 more jbc's, that's the judge's booth controller, the electronic ballot box. I have already been able to purchase out of the existing funds in the 10% budget 50 e slates and five jbc's. So I will be coming back to the court to formally ask for is funding for 35 additional e slates and six jbc's, that will carry us through all of the beefing up for the regular early voting locations plus the two mega sites. The cost for the equipment is estimated at $102,000 to purchase new equipment and that is something that would need to come out of the fy '08 budget. So it's an immediate expense.
>> how much is that expense -- dana? How much would that need to come out of the fy 2008 budget?
>> 102,000 for the equipment.
>> okay. About 58, $60,000 for personnel that would actually -- would actually come out of the fy '09 budget dollars. But this 60% is still a great reduction from what we thought that we were going to have to fund for fail safe. So our initial plan can include this personnel and still be much less under the amount that we originally anticipated for that particular problem.
>> dana, let me ask you something. Is the reason that you can't use the machinery that would be used on election day in these meeting a good sites is because that information can only go into that machine, it has to stay in that machine? At mega sites. Because you would normally, the way that I was thinking about this thing is that during election -- during the regular election day, you have got what 200.
>> 212 or so.
>> sites, you have x amount per site, all right. So if you wanted to have mega sites on early voting, you would just take all of those e slates and you would -- because you're not using all of those, but is there something that I'm missing here? Once you set up an e slate and the voting starts, then you can't calculate what's on that machine, store that and -- in some vault and say okay those are the numbers? Is that the reason that you can't use the machines that you have got for 212 voting locations early?
>> right.
>> what am I missing?
>> it's a very good question. The technical answer is yes, you can use the early voting equipment and replay it into election day, redeploy it into election day. The reason why it is not done, it's never been done here, it's not done quite frankly in anyplace that I know of in the united states for two reasons. The first reason is the logistics of getting the equipment back in on Friday night and being able to thoroughly clean it, thoroughly retest and redeploy it in time really for Sunday pick up in order to be ready for Tuesday. So there is a definite time crunch there. The second thing is it is a security mechanism. You know precisely what's on that machine and there's no hurry up about off loading it or when do you off load it, do you need permission early to do all of that. So while many Commissioners courts have grappled with what looks like the obvious efficiency with this issue, pretty much once you study it, what you determine is that what you gain from being able to redeploy you significantly lose in the tracking of those machines and what total votes are on there and the ability of them to be completely retested before they're put back in the field. It has become a security item. Almost none of the vendors will recommend that their clients try to reuse their equipment.
>> what market is there for these things as used pieces of equipment?
>> there is a used market absolutely for this equipment.
>> can you see why this is going to be, we're going to have all of these extra machines, we may not have this kind of turnout for some time. Then all of a sudden you have a warehouse full of machines.
>> yeah. We would have an inventory of -- it's not that many machines, but we would have an inventory of some extras that we wouldn't need until we had another very large turnout. That is true. The market for used equipment is hot. If you put stuff on the market and say I'm Travis County and we want to resell some of our equipment, it will be snatched up. In fact the reason why I'm not able to buy used equipment, it's such a hot market they are hard to get. If you wanted to sell, unked absolutely sell.
>> 102 plus 60,000?
>> yes, sir.
>> okay.
>> with the idea that fail safe has been greatly reduced.
>> but it's still 60,000?
>> yes, sir. For people. Now, one of the things that I -- that I did, I made kind of an assumption about the court that you would want me to pursue someplace, a mega site north and south. You of course have options if you would like for me to only operate one of them I can certainly do that and make it known to everybody that all of these early voting sites are available to anyone at any time as long as you are a registered voter in Travis County. You can go anywhere. But I brought the proposal to you because that's kind of the way that we have always done it to try to be mindful of the fact that we do live across a river and we have bridges that cross that river.
>> do we have the ability -- we do have the ability, are we going to work with the media forums to almost perhaps from a public service announcement, the psa announcement, that this is something that you really need to prepare for and I mean talk to the statesman about every day on the front you say you have another day of early voting so you won't get caught to promote it and to do it on the radio, do it everywhere you possibly can just to let folks know that if you don't do this, then you might as well take off a complete day to vote on Tuesday.
>> well, absolutely. We will be doing a big push. I have even got partners to help me do that. Aisd is also going to be making sure that the parents of its children get the word about early voting and that it really might be more convenient for them to pick a day other than election day. I do want to be cautious and not try to indicate to people that we have not planned for election day. We don't want to send the message of if you didn't get to vote election day, well then it's, you know, you have got a big hurdle in front of you. That won't be the case in most situations, but to the extent that we can pull people in a broader time frame away from that condensed time frame on election day it will be better for each individual voter. So yes I'm going to pull out every stop that I can think of. I have no qualms about begging to get on any kind of media or newsletter or anything to send the word out that these are the early voting locations and we strongly encourage you to use them. And I do think that there's a lot of favorable trend right now operating or trends that are operating in our favor because I think with this particular election by the time early voting opens, I think a lot of people will already have made up their minds, they are going to want to go vote. I don't think it's one of those cases where people are still going to be deciding, I think that it's -- I think that they will appreciate the opportunity to vote early. They meaning the voters.
>> can you give us all of the details in the backup? Did you?
>> yes, sir.
>> we will be able to discuss this further next Tuesday.
>> yes, sir.
>> we appreciate your time.
>> the only thing that I need from the court today is an indication that it's okay for the other departments to proceed with their work. Like for example facilities and its with the extra telephone lines and the generator which is going to come out of existing budget. No amendment.
>> so move.
>> second.
>> Commissioner Davis?
>>
>> [indiscernible] dana, other governmental entities that may have items on the ballot, I think aisd I think is one of them maybe.
>> yes.
>> well, are they still anticipating the cost sharing? Because I notice these figures here that came up, but then I started thinking I said wait a minute, we have other governmental entities that are participating in this. So this is a cost share relationship or will there be?
>> yes, Commissioner, both the city of Austin and Austin independent school district along with I think it's seven other entities. Small -- much smaller entities. Yes, we do have cost sharing for this election.
>> okay.
>> we will be able to balance out, depending on the proportionate share once we get all of the final plan in place for what this particular proposal for polling places is going to look like. We'll have a better idea for who gets what share of it.
>> okay. I just wanted to --
>> we'll do our best.
>> make sure we are still doing that.
>> yes, we are.
>> okay.
>> motion is for the cooperating county departments to proceed. Any more discussion? All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote. Thank you very much.
>> thank you, you are more than welcome and --
>> see you next Tuesday.
>> if I have just a second, let me just say the -- Commissioners court is the best in the state for do knowledge everything they can to take care of voters. Absolutely.
>> [ applause ] you all are really wonderful, it is my honor to work with you.
>> thank you.
>> thank you, dana. We are ready for executive session. Right?
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Last Modified:
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 8:37 AM