November 2015

Veterans Day

November 11 is Veterans' Day. I want to thank all of our staff who have served our country through military service, and now continue to serve the public at a local level. We have veterans in every department; please take the time to acknowledge their service.

Something in the Water?
For whatever reason, our organization seems to be experiencing a rash of retirements, either announced or informally talked about. I won't attempt to list them out of concern for leaving someone out. But I do know we will be losing a lot of experience, and folks who will be missed and who will be hard to replace.


A New City Council Member
The City Council has appointed Charles Collins to fill the vacancy created by Councilor Bowerman's resignation. Councilor Collins previously served on the Budget Committee (and as Chair for the last year). He is wrapping up (as of December) a 32-year career as Sales Executive in the apparel industry with the VF Corporation, whose brands include (among many others) Lee, the North Face, and Jansport. Mr. Collins is an Air Force veteran and Past President of the Lake Oswego Rotary Club. He and his wife Candice live in Old Town.

Safety Award
At the League of Oregon Cities annual conference, City/County Insurance Services presented Lake Oswego with an award for workplace safety, based on time loss due to injuries in the past year. We were the only organization in our size class that received the award. Thanks to all of you for following safe practices; keep it up!

Caped Crusaders
Interoffice mail is being delivered on 10/30 by a pair of caped crusaders. An investigation has revealed the true identities of Batman and Robin: Dave and Deghan Arpin.

LEAN OSWEGO

Making Public Records More Accessible
The City Manager’s Office, in coordination with the IT Department has implemented the first stage of its Laserfiche Electronic Records Repository which is now online for public records access. You can reach this new tool at www.lakeoswego.city/Weblink/ and you can now search through all approved Agenda & Minutes that exist for the Council, the Development Review Commission, the Planning Commission, and other advisory boards. You can find city ordinances, resolutions and recorded instruments there too. More document categories will be added to the archive on a continuous basis.

Curious about what went on at the first Council meeting on January 21, 1910? Reading the minutes would suggest that it was a simpler time! (The document is here: https://www.ci.oswego.or.us/weblink/0/doc/995/Page1.aspx)

Planning & Building Services--Quicker Reviews
In November, the City will begin Enhanced Completeness Reviews for new single family building permits. This pilot program is intended to reduce the overall time it takes to issue permits when no land use decision is required. It also seeks to improve the quality of plan submittals and avoid complications once construction begins. The pilot consists of: 1) clearer instructions to builders in the form of a unified checklist; and, 2) improved coordination among the City departments (Planning, Building, Engineering and Fire) through a standing ‘plan review’ meeting.

Library--Streamlined Processing of Materials
Technical Services and Youth Services departments are teaming up to streamline ordering and processing procedures for children’s materials. One huge time-saver has been to download on-order children’s materials records to the catalog from Ingram, (one of our vendors). By doing so, records are in the system prior to receipt of the item allowing patrons to place holds on children’s books before they arrive (similar to the procedure for the adult collection).

Another huge time-saver is that the item records are in the catalog at the time that the items arrive, greatly reducing the amount of hand-keying record data into the catalog. Additionally, Youth services is marking their materials for cataloging in a more efficient manner: carts of books arrive from youth services marked in groups of like items, rather than items marked individually.

Public Works--Electronically Generated Work Orders

Typically Utility Billing generates a daily list of address/meters that need to be read for move-outs and move-ins as well as re-reads that are printed out on paper, taken to the field by Water Operations staff, brought back to the office where Administrative staff scan the information and send back to Utility Billing. A new automated process of communication between Utility Billing and Operations should conservatively save 2+ hours of staff time per week, and somewhere between 5-10 reams of paper per year. This effort is in collaboration with IT (Wes Pay), using our new “water shut-off and turn-on” tool as the template for this process improvement.

Human Resources--Paperless Personnel Action Forms
With the support of IT, the HR department is piloting a paperless process for approving Personnel Action Forms.

Fire--Effective Use of On-Board Computers
Working closely with LOCOM leadership, the Fire Department is amending its policy on how to use the on-board mobile data computers (MDC) found in our emergency response vehicles. Previously our policy required that we communicate with LOCOM verbally over the radio anytime we go on the air or change status.

The time required for LOCOM dispatchers to acknowledge non-emergency radio communications from the fire companies takes time away from processing other critically important 911 calls, giving medical instructions to callers, or from dispatching other fire and/or police incidents.

Fire staff are now using their on-board MDCs to record status changes. The software installed on the MDCs communicates electronically with the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) computer at LOCOM. With the push of a button, fire companies can go on the air, acknowledge that they are responding or arriving on scene, clearing the incident, or make themselves available to be dispatched. Change of status is accomplished without either side having to respond verbally.

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