Minnesota. It’s not called the land of ten thousand lakes for nothing. This aqueous state needs a total of 45 watershed districts to manage water quality and to regulate any land development projects near bodies of water.

In Minnesota, watershed districts are local, special-purpose units of government that work to solve and prevent water-related problems. The boundaries of each district follow those of a natural watershed and consist of land in which all water flows to one outlet, and districts are usually named after that watershed. They range in size from the Carnelian-Marine District with 43 square miles, to the Red Lake Watershed District with 5990 square miles.

The Rice Creek Watershed District has been managing the water in the lower Southeast corner of the state since 1972. Rice Creek, a tributary of the Mississippi River is approximately 28 miles long and drains a watershed of 201 square miles of Anoka, Hennepin, Ramsey and Washington counties. Portions of the district can be found in 28 municipalities.

State regulations mandate that government agencies maintain an historic record of files, so the District’s records room was drowning in paper files dating back to the District’s founding in 1972. Their almost half-century of records filled 20 filing cabinets and 45 additional bankers’ boxes, and files were growing at an alarming rate. And because the District had no disaster recovery backup plan, a fire or flood could wipe out nearly 40 years of records in an instant.

Besides the massive backlog of unprotected files, the District’s paper-based building permit process created costly logistical deadlines. “When a new permit request came in, it was given a permit number and a file number and then sent to an outside engineering consulting firm 25 miles away,” says District Administrator Doug Thomas. “We would need to have it sent by courier or mail, or someone from their office would come pick it up – all which took up a lot of time. Since we have a permit deadline each month, time was a big issue.”

Rice Creek was among the first watershed districts to look into Laserfiche after hearing rave reviews from City of Shoreview‘s IS Manager, Dick Crumb. Crumb contacted Laserfiche reseller Larry Phelps from Solbrekk and suggested Phelps introduce Rice Creek’s staff to Laserfiche. (Check out a video of Crumb demonstrating Laserfiche to over 40 employees from 18 Minnesota cities here).

When Phelps showed Thomas and his staff how easily their paper could be scanned, indexed, managed and searched with Laserfiche, they were quick to implement. Ned Phillips, the person responsible for IT at the District, decided to purchase Laserfiche and a Canon 3080 scanner. He also added Import Agent so that staff could scan and import documents into Laserfiche right from their digital scanner and copier.

Today, Rice Creek scans all their current documents and are reaping the benefits of having documents close at hand. The permit application process in particular has been greatly streamlined.

“Each permit application is scanned immediately,” says Thomas. “Laserfiche creates a place where everyone can go electronically and work with that file without having to find the paper file, make a copy, and deal with paper boxes and spend hours making copies.”

And now engineers no longer have to wait for files to arrive by mail, which completely eliminates the rush to meet deadlines. “We gave the engineers their own licenses, so they can view a file immediately after it’s been scanned into Laserfiche. This definitely helped us to meet permit deadlines,” Thomas adds.

Disaster recovery is also no longer an issue. “Rather than having boxes and boxes in fireproof and waterproof hard storage—which can get pretty costly—our files are backed up in electronic form in Laserfiche,” says Thomas. “It is a far better information management system than paper.”

Adds Phillips, “We now have the peace of mind that our documents are now secure.”

Thomas offers the following advice to other administrators who might hesitate to make the investment needed to get their own Laserfiche system off the ground. “Most people worry about the initial investment and the labor involved with scanning,” he says. He suggests hiring an outside agency to handle all backlog conversion scanning, and to start scanning everyday business processes immediately. “Once it’s done, your day-to-day business processes become much more streamlined,” he says.

Now staff can’t imagine life without Laserfiche. “Just today, I had a call about a project in 1990,” says Thomas. “I was able to go into Laserfiche and find the engineer’s report for that project and use Laserfiche to e-mail the file directly to that person in 5 minutes.

“I can’t imagine how many hours would have gone into trying to find that same record if it were stored in files and boxes somewhere,” he adds.

Tags: business continuity, disaster recovery, Import Agent, permitting, special districts

Posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 2:52 pm under Customer Stories, Special Districts, State and Local Government. You can comment on this post.