Prior to the creation of the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) in 1946, however, Contra Costa County—located east of San Francisco, CA—was in crisis. A post-war building boom had brought an influx of new residents, most of them relying on septic systems that didn’t take well to the area’s heavy adobe clay soil. With septic tanks overflowing and waterborne diseases such as typhoid becoming a potential threat, health authorities considered the polluted conditions in the county to be among the worst in California.

As a result, the CCCSD was formed as a special district, a sewer system and treatment plants were put in place, and the public received much-needed access to safe water and sanitation.

By 2002, CCCSD had expanded to meet the needs of 450,000 people by maintaining 1,500 miles of sewer lines and treating an average of 45 million gallons of wastewater per day. But with 56 years of service came 56 years of records—including permits, construction plans and Board documents. Storage space was at a premium, gaining access to information was difficult and time-consuming, and the district wanted to strengthen its disaster recovery plans.

“Over the years, CCCSD has created a reliable and efficient infrastructure to handle the wastewater needs of thousands of Central Contra Costa residents,” says John Phillips, IT systems analyst for CCCSD. “Laserfiche is helping to add similar efficiency and reliability to our IT infrastructure, allowing us to provide our staff with faster access to the content they need to do their jobs.”

Implementing ECM

The special district enlisted Laserfiche reseller ECS Imaging to build out its information management infrastructure with Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM).

The first department to implement Laserfiche was the Secretary of the District, which converted critical Board documents from CCCSD’s inception in 1946 through the present into an easily accessible, digital form. The Permits operation was next, with a much larger and more complicated filing backlog of permits and record drawings. This conversion process is still underway today.

“It was important for us to select a system that could handle many different forms of content,” says Phillips. “Documents are simple. Maps and drawings are where things get more complex.”

Today, permit job files (including maps and drawings) are scanned into Laserfiche offsite by ECS Imaging. This practice centralizes content management, reduces the need for physical storage space, minimizes wear and tear on the originals and enables convenient access to them by CCCSD employees.

Since 2002, many other departments have begun using Laserfiche to manage a wide variety of content, including:

• Maps and drawings (Engineering Support)
• Right of Way agreement files (Right of Way)
• Employee and retiree files (Human Resources)
• Standard operating procedures (Lab)
• Discharge permit documentation (Plant Operations)

Expanding ECM by Integrating GIS

To further improve information access, the special district expanded its use of Laserfiche by integrating it with CCCSD’s GIS system, AutoDesk MapGuide. The in-house integration grants engineers, permit counter staff and field maintenance crews instantaneous access to scanned permits and record drawings. This is particularly important for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.

“Prior to the integration of Laserfiche and the GIS system, field crews were unable to access any of these records directly,” explains Carl Von Stetten, information systems analyst, Engineering Support, CCCSD. “They had to take the time to retrieve copies from a variety of filing rooms.”

To access scanned permits and record drawings, users simply double-click on a parcel or pipeline within a map, and then follow the links in the subsequent reports to content stored in the Laserfiche repository. According to Von Stetten, “This has eliminated time spent looking up hard copy permits and drawings and enabled our crews to be more productive in the field.”

Business Benefits

“Our deployment has focused on achieving specific business goals rather than on technical bells and whistles,” explains Phillips, “which is why we’ve had so much success.”

The key benefits CCCSD has realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Today, all employees have easy online access to current and historical records, which are centralized in the Laserfiche repository. Access to additional content such as permits, HR files and operating procedures is granted to authorized users based on Laserfiche security protocol. Laserfiche search tools enable staff to locate information quickly, so time is no longer wasted on finding, copying and distributing content. The system has also reduced CCCSD’s need for storage space.
• Easy integration with GIS. By linking Laserfiche to its GIS system, CCCSD engineers, permit counter staff, and field maintenance crews can instantly access scanned permits and record drawings. This is a particular timesaver for CCCSD’s field crews, which operate out of a separate facility without convenient access to paper records.
• Improved disaster recovery. In the past, disaster protection focused on preserving and protecting vulnerable paper copies. The installation of Laserfiche, with redundant off-site storage, has greatly improved the district’s ability to protect historical and vital records. “We hope we never face an emergency that will demonstrate the benefits of having Laserfiche,” says Phillips, “but we have to be prepared.”

“My best advice for companies that want to extend their information management infrastructure with ECM is to talk to other users who’ve done what you’re trying to do,” concludes Phillips. “Leverage their experience to ease your implementation and achieve your goals.”

“The answer in our case is absolutely not,” says Renee Geyer, City Clerk of this farming community in Western Kansas with a population of 1,700. “These tools enable us to serve our constituents much more effectively.”

“In our view, smaller cities and towns should all be looking to bring in these capabilities. They’re needed now and are only going to become more necessary in the future.”

Leoti is investing a portion of a $2.1 million USDA Rural Development grant and loan into an information management system featuring ESRI GIS and a Laserfiche document management system.

“The grant is specifically for waterworks improvements,” Ms. Geyer says. “As a byproduct of that project, however, the grant will also enable us to improve our ability to deliver every municipal service.”

“We need ESRI for our waterworks, for example, so that we can pinpoint the location of water mains, hydrants and valves when we need to get at them for repairs and upgrades. At the same time, we see that other services, including telephone, cable, gas and electricity, are going underground. You can’t deal with these things visually any more and have to recognize that GIS is the wave of the future for taking care of them, too.”

As the ESRI maps are built and populated, Leoti is also implementing a Laserfiche document management system to create a searchable digital archive of all city records. City officials have three distinct goals in mind:

• To make it possible for ESRI users to retrieve supporting information, such as maintenance reports on a particular water hydrant, with the click of a mouse.
• To create a central, instantly searchable records library accessible to all authorized city employees.
• To serve as the link between ESRI and the city’s Summit finance and accounting system.

“Most importantly, the integration of Laserfiche with the other programs will enable us to automate the transfer of information from one system to the other,” Ms Geyer says. “In addition, Laserfiche is a user friendly application. Having it as the integration point will enable city employees who are not experts at ESRI or Summit to retrieve information needed, especially when responding to requests from citizens.”

Ms. Geyer recognizes that cost is the biggest obstacle facing other small municipalities thinking of following Leoti’s lead. “We could not have made the budgetary commitment without the grant, even though I believe that the two systems will more than pay for themselves,” she says.

“In addition to seeking their own grants, small cities and towns could look into joining forces with other agencies such as the schools and county government or putting together a group of small municipalities to share the costs. In my opinion, they will come to agree that the benefits far outweigh any possible drawbacks.”

The county seat of Wichita County, Leoti consistently ranks high in state surveys of per capita income and education levels. In addition to its many farms, employers include one of the largest cattle feedlots in the US, a feed mill and a corn-to-alcohol conversion plant.

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.

“That same year, we got a new Finance Director. We’ll call her Brenda (not her real name),” Pilgrim explains. “We were having our second weekly meeting with her and she blurted out ‘We’re getting rid of Laserfiche.’ We were all shocked.”

Pilgrim took it upon himself to prove the system’s worth. He went into what he calls “stealth mode,” personally approaching other departments about stepping up their use of Laserfiche, tactfully earning their trust and answering their concerns along the way. Simply put, Laserfiche had its internal champion, but the software ultimately sold itself, user by user, process by process, department by department.

Albany, OR, Network Administrator Allen Pilgrim

“Most people were fearful of losing their precious paper. I sat down in meetings with people and just one on one made it clear that I was committed to ensuring the safety of their data,” Pilgrim explains. “As we progressed, people saw the evidence that I was serious.”

The Building division in Community Development was interested, for instance, but thought Laserfiche was limited to just the Finance Department. Pilgrim pointed out the annual maintenance had been moved to the IT budget, leaving Laserfiche open for intra-office adoption.

“What happened next was nothing short of amazing,” Pilgrim says. “The Building division latched onto Laserfiche as if it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.” Building’s Allison Liesse began scanning all day, every day, eventually working with Pilgrim to purchase a wide-format scanner. IT Staff even came up with interface integration with the city’s Accela PermPlus permitting software so that building inspectors could retrieve Laserfiche documents through the application. Within a year, storage jumped from 10 to 42 4.6GB volumes. Now, inspired both by Building’s success and Pilgrim’s handling of the implementation, Albany’s Planning division has come on board just this year.

Around the same time, Paul Jacobson in the Public Works Engineering division was interested in Laserfiche. Pilgrim was able to, as he puts it, “give him an area in Laserfiche to play with.” Jacobson’s experience inspired his whole department to convert to using Laserfiche. “There was no longer any talk of getting rid of Laserfiche because it had become too valuable to the City and more people were using it all the time.”

By 2006, Pilgrim convinced Albany’s IT Director to add Laserfiche as a standard install on every computer in the city. Pilgrim notes that by then, IT was independent from the Finance Department – and that “Brenda” had since moved on.

In 2008, the police department requested a demo. “They fell in love with the product,” Pilgrim says – and he was soon requesting two high-end scanners and training several PD employees. Concurrently, Pilgrim implemented Quick Fields. Police reports are now completely automated with Quick Fields. “They just drop them into the scanner and they’re done,” explains Pilgrim. Planning has since come on board; by now Public Works was now doing all of their projects in Laserfiche. Ambulance Billing has become, as Pilgrim puts it “another Quick Fields success story.” Operations also started doing more with Laserfiche.

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

Pilgrim worked with Albany’s new (post-“Brenda”) Finance Director to approve the purchase and implementation of Quick Fields following a demo last year by reseller Michael Dane of VPCI. “We determined it would be perfect for four departments and the benefits have been spectacular,” Pilgrim says.

1. Allison Liesse in Building says it has saved her literally hundreds of hours of work – it saves her four hours a month processing timesheets alone.
2. Ambulance Billing reports are automatically processed by Quick Fields, which saves “dozens upon dozens” of hours.
3. For the Police Department, automatically processing thousands and thousands of police reports has been the biggest benefit of the city’s Quick Fields implementation. The failure rate is less than 1%. “Changing the slashes in the dates to dashes made all the difference,” Pilgrim notes. “Basically they just drop a stack of reports in the scanner and their job is done.”

The Future

Already in 2009, Pilgrim has done demos for staff of the Municipal Court, which has since started using the system, as well as to Albany’s Fire Department. The City Manager’s office and the HR Department are the latest additions, while the Parks & Recreation Department is slowly but surely adopting their own system. And all of Purchasing’s paperwork is stored in Laserfiche. “Most recently our GIS division had me set it up so they could move all of their As-Builts into Laserfiche,” adds Pilgrim.

Besides efficient (and satisfied) city employees in virtually every department, 2009 marks another Laserfiche milestone: the City of Albany will be only the third city in Oregon to launch “Digital Image as Original” (DIO). This will allow the city to maintain digital copies for many of our records,” explains Pilgrim. “This will allow us to lead the way on being more green, because it’s fun being green.” And as Albany has proved, Brendas of the world be darned, it’s fun being efficient, too.

Register for the “Laserfiche for Local Government = ECM + BPM” Webinar and learn more.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

Bakersfield, CA, IS Director Bob Trammell

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

Downtown Bakersfield with City Hall and Police Headquarters at left and Hall of Records at right

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

CSU Bakersfield's Walter Stiern Library

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

Once it had developed a substantial archive, however, Buffalo began to outgrow its initial digital system. In addition to experiencing support problems when the city upgraded its operating system, staff found that the search function became painfully slow when the document database accumulated several years’ worth of records.

MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick

With an eye toward efficient search and retrieval, as well as integration with the city’s GIS system, Auger and MIS Coordinator Chris Shinnick formed a committee to spearhead the search for a new digital document management system. Shinnick remembers, “We wanted a system that could do a better job of organizing our information, so that we could purge documents to keep them from taking up physical space in our office. We needed to import documents from the previous system, perform full-text searches and save disk space by efficiently storing files. Staff also needed a secure system that would enable the city to share public documents over the Web.”

Shinnick consulted with experts from other cities, many of whom recommended Laserfiche^®. After demonstrations from Laserfiche, Fortis^® and DocuWare^®, Laserfiche was the clear winner. Not only could Laserfiche software meet all the city’s requirements, but its ease of use made it the overwhelming favorite of city staff. The user interface was so straightforward that it made the other options seem difficult and cumbersome by comparison. “The search function in Laserfiche was so much more dynamic than in our previous product,” says Auger.

A few months after purchasing Laserfiche, Buffalo had installed all the features it needed and completed its document conversion. The city then faced the challenge of accommodating all the city staff who wanted to scan documents into the system. Buffalo set up a second scanning station to handle the demand. Now, the city’s administration, finance, utility billing, water/sewer/electric and engineering departments all use Laserfiche, with users in different locations connecting to the same system.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

—Merton Auger
City Administrator

Implementing a geographical information system (GIS) integration was critical to Auger’s vision of collaboration. In addition to office staff relying on GIS for planning and zoning functions and utility services, field personnel needed access to these documents as well. “Whether it was our street department people trying to locate a storm sewer outlet or our water and sewer department looking for a water shutoff valve,” says Auger, “the bottom line was collaboration and cross-departmental functionality. Laserfiche met these criteria.”

Buffalo’s reseller, Crabtree Companies, Inc., helped the city find just the right tool to set up the integration. Geodoc, developed by Urban Crossroads, Inc., enabled Buffalo to link Laserfiche with its GIS software, ArcIMS™ from ESRI^®. Buffalo beta tested the product. “And it worked very well,” says Shinnick. “There wasn’t a lot of room for improvement or enhancement. They’ll continue to make enhancements to it, but for something that came right out of the box, it didn’t function like other beta products—it was already very good.”

Urban Crossroads is now making Geodoc available to users through the Laserfiche Professional Developer Partnership™ (PDP) program, which showcases innovative, third-party solutions to integration challenges. Information about this integration is available through the new PDP Marketplace.

“We have a mobile wireless network here in Buffalo,” adds Auger. “With the Laserfiche/GIS integration, both applications are Web-based so our field crews can access information from their laptops. That really supports the collaboration we need. If a citizen calls in about a broken streetlight or a manhole being plugged, the crew can use the tablet PC in their truck or car, access the database, find the location and fix the problem in real time.

“We also handle some of our Web-based functions for interaction with citizens that way. My philosophy has always been that whatever information we have is owned by the citizens of Buffalo. Basically, we want to get as much information as possible up and accessible for citizens. We also have a very big interest in achieving a paperless office, and that means you don’t exclude anything, except where there are security concerns to prevent access to people with wrongful intent.

“It goes along with our philosophy,” Auger continues, “that citizens should be able to access information any time they want. If they work during the day, they don’t want to get off work and come into our office to access information. They can go to our Website and access information when they want to, so we’re on their schedule. And it cuts down on our desk time, too.

Buffalo is currently in the process of getting the fire department onboard with the system. The city plans to arrange for laptops for the volunteer firefighters so they can log onto the system and realize the full benefit of the GIS integration. “Our plan,” says Auger, “is to push the system out to every department, so they have access to the information they need. Again, it’s all about collaboration.”

Auger, who is directly accountable to the city council, has been preparing agendas electronically for years, using Adobe® Acrobat®. Now he automatically enters those documents into the Laserfiche repository, so citizens and councilors can access them within the same folder structure they use to access all the city’s documents. Auger notes, “As a management practice, we scan almost everything and our people have been instructed how to use a central scanner.” That practice enables Auger to include handwritten or other non-digital supporting documentation with the council agendas.

Since the city installed Laserfiche, Shinnick has noticed positive changes in the way Buffalo conducts business. “Previously, a couple of people might be designated to ‘file’ documents,” he says. “Now each department is becoming more involved in the storing of this information and is taking an interest in it. They know that how they put the information into Laserfiche will determine how they get it out. It eliminates the problem of one person arbitrarily making decisions about where something gets filed because they don’t understand how the filing in each department functions.” Shinnick also notes that the Laserfiche solution has added to staff’s productive time, in some cases eliminating the need to hire new personnel or the need to go off-site to look for a document.

“Laserfiche has saved us a tremendous amount of time, money and space,” says Auger. “All of our property records are electronic, for example. All the building permits and planning and zoning information for particular parcels are stored in the Laserfiche repository. Our office would have to be about three times its current size just to store them, if we hadn’t adopted digital document management in such a big way.

“Yesterday, when someone called with a permit request, all our staff had to do was call the document up from the desktop and ask where to email it. When you do a simple search it comes up so fast—it saves so much personnel time. You used to have to go to the file, find the document, copy it—it could have taken hours. What’s more, a lot of times staff doesn’t even have to be involved—citizens can perform those searches themselves. I don’t even think we know how much time it’s saved us.”

Most valuable to Auger is the quick access to information from anywhere in the city for both staff and citizens. The staff and citizens of Buffalo love the system. “Just yesterday,” recalls Auger, “someone called the office asking for information about a building permit, and he happened to work for a nearby city of 40,000. Our front-desk staff was able to quickly email him a scanned document. He wrote back, ‘That’s really awesome—we can’t even do that where I work!’”

Buffalo’s Deer Lake Orchard produces a bountiful harvest each fall.

Auger finds Laserfiche especially useful when addressing city finances. “It really helps me when the council does the auditing of the bills,” he says. “Before, I had three large file folders full of paid claims, and if they wanted to question something I’d have dig through the whole file to find what they were looking for. It could take the whole hour we had set aside for the review just to find the right document. Now I just open the digital archive on the computer and I can locate the proper file right away. We have two large screens in the room we use for auditing, so I can bring it up on the screen for them to look at. It saves a tremendous amount of time.”

Shinnick is particularly enthusiastic about the Laserfiche Quick Fields™ bar code feature. “We’ve implemented that solution with our finance office so they can scan in paid invoices. It reads the voucher that gets attached with the details of what’s been paid and it automatically files it. They can just throw a stack of these things into the scanner and the system will scan them all, file them appropriately and fill in the template fields. It’s so quick and easy! It’s a tremendous tool for them.

“It didn’t take much to get that mechanism in place, either. We just had the company that supports our finance software add some bar codes to the bottom of the check stub voucher so that Quick Fields could read it.”

Buffalo plans to increase the already-sizable role that Laserfiche plays in its municipal planning, workflow and recordkeeping. Says Auger, “We’re going to be even more successful in the future and make the system even more accessible. I want to market the system so that citizens know it’s there. In order to be relevant to people, we have to do business the way they do it with their bank, or wherever they order online. Government has to be as relevant as anyone else, or more so.

“Laserfiche saves us a tremendous amount of room, and the time savings are incalculable. It’s a perfect interface for the way we do business and the operating philosophy we have.”

Brit Fontenot

A stunning view of the Rockies, a rich cultural life and a strong local economy led Bizjournals magazine to conclude that Bozeman, Montana offers the best quality of life of any small town in America. Excellent public service is one reason Bozeman calls itself “The Most Livable Place” for its 32,000 citizens. To maintain that high standard, the city clerk of commission’s office adopted an electronic document management solution for public records.

Employees expected to save time and improve efficiency in the city clerk’s office for Montana’s fifth largest city. But they got more than they bargained for when they found they could deliver an added benefit to residents. Not only can Bozeman’s citizens access public records over the Web, but the city’s most document-heavy department manages and publishes agendas and related documents online, making the process easy for staff and citizens alike. In this issue, City Clerk Brit Fontenot, Deputy City Clerk Stuart John Bernard and GIS Manager Jon Henderson give an inside view of the solution, its unexpected benefits and its future possibilities.

When citizens wanted to look at a deed or find out what the city commission would be discussing at its next meeting, they called the city clerk’s office. For years, staff had found the records in a file cabinet, copied them and either sent them to residents or had them pick them up. When requests began coming by e-mail, city employees still had to rely on paper and file cabinets.

E-mail created its own complications when city staff prepared agenda packets with materials from the planning department. With numerous e-mail exchanges concerning each agenda, employees found it difficult to track changes and ensure that the final agenda was the correct one.

Bozeman’s recently retired City Clerk, Robin Sullivan, had held the office for nearly thirty years. After so many years on the job, she had a wealth of information, with even the most peripheral facts at her fingertips. When Sullivan wasn’t around, staff sometimes found it difficult to rummage through paper files to find a requested record. Even when it was clear where to look, searching through paper files was time consuming.

Sullivan first heard about Laserfiche at the yearly Montana Clerk’s Institute in Billings, and she decided to look into electronic document management to ease records management and smooth processes within the clerk’s office. According to GIS Manager Jon Henderson, who was there for the installation, there was no need to test other products.

“It was clear from the beginning that Laserfiche was the leader in document management. We very quickly saw that it was the right solution for us,” says Henderson. The Laserfiche installation was simple. “It took less than an hour. And within a couple of days we had people trained and scanning in.”

Bozeman installed Laserfiche on a dedicated server with plenty of storage space to ensure room to grow. City offices have multiple scanning stations, using high-end, small-format scanners and a large-format scanner for the GIS department to scan in maps and drawings.

In the early stages of using Laserfiche, Bozeman configured the system to give access only to employees. But seeing the potential for citizen interaction, the city upgraded its system to include secure Web access for residents. More recently, Bozeman added Laserfiche Agenda Manager™ to speed and simplify preparation, submission, approval and publication of agenda items for city commission meetings.

Jon Henderson

“It was clear from the beginning that Laserfiche was the leader in document management. We very quickly saw that it was the right solution for us.”

—Jon Henderson, GIS Manager

Fontenot especially appreciates the acquisition of Laserfiche Agenda Manager. “We started with our largest department, the planning department, which is very document-intensive. They have not only Adobe^® PDF, Microsoft^® Word or Excel documents but also maps that come in from developers in all different formats. Now the planners are able to compile all the information and send it to the Agenda Manager, so that we receive it in a readable form.”

He also appreciates the increased accuracy and efficiency in the approval process. “Laserfiche routes the workflow very efficiently, and it allows the approval process to move forward without having to keep running up to see if planners are in their offices. It’s all automated—we save a lot of time, we don’t miss any documents and documents are updated more efficiently. Ultimately, we can meet our deadlines much more easily.”

“We used to receive the documents through standard e-mail. Prior to our deadline, the planners could add to or remove the information for the packets. It became quite confusing because you might have six or seven e-mails with updated information, deleted information or reports that had been changed. Since we’re not experts in planning, it would be hard for us in the clerk’s office to review each change and know what was right. Agenda Manager allows the planners to upload the changes themselves, which means that when we get it, we’re assured that what we receive is the final product.”

On Thursdays, when the clerk’s office assembles agenda packets for the city commission meetings, Fontenot estimates that Laserfiche eliminates at least two hours worth of work for staff members. But that’s just in preparation.

“Not only does it save us time in compiling the agenda, it really saves us time when we put the agenda up on the Web. We don’t have to go through the old process of creating the PDF files and uploading them to the Web. It was a labor-intensive process because of our Web interface. But Laserfiche does all that for us. We just place it up there in a big digital packet and it’s done.”

Fontenot calculates that Agenda Manager saves at least three hours of work time per meeting, adding, “And that’s just in one department. Our strategy is to take one department at a time and get them fully functional with Agenda Manager. Once we get other departments on the system, we’re going to save a huge amount of time.”

Before being promoted to deputy clerk, Bernard was initially hired to scan documents into Laserfiche. He began with city ordinances and city commission charter resolutions dating back to the 1930s. In addition to commission meeting minutes, Bernard eventually scanned in agreements and calls for bids. After using Laserfiche for less than a year, the vast majority of city commission documents, over 92,000 images comprising more than 25,000 documents, are in the Laserfiche repository.

According to Bernard, residents most frequently want to access meeting minutes to find out how members of the commission voted. They also want to look at agendas, resolutions, ordinances and easements. People still call the clerk’s office for records but now staff can quickly search the repository for the requested record. “More importantly,” says Bernard, “they can very easily search online for anything they need. We get a lot of positive feedback about that.”

While mail or physical pickup are still options for delivering records to citizens, city employees usually take full advantage of the automation Laserfiche provides. Often staff can e-mail a copy of the document to the citizen. Occasionally, they copy files to CDs or flash drives the residents bring in.

“In the past people would come in and we would make copies for 25 cents a page,” says City Clerk Fontenot. “Now we put ten, hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages on a CD or e-mail PDF documents. It saves money, supplies and wear and tear on city equipment. If a citizen has the time I walk them through the search process over the Web link. Then the next time they can find it themselves. Give someone a fish and they eat for a day. Teach them to fish and they eat for life.”

However Fontenot and Bernard deliver the records, they can find them in seconds online. “I really saw how useful it was to search by keyword, especially after Robin left and we couldn’t just ask her what had happened fifteen years ago. And it makes it so much easier when someone comes in and asks what week we passed a resolution. I can just search the agendas and have an answer.”

Bernard notes that searching by index fields also brings quick results. That’s quite a contrast to the old days of paper files. Bernard recalls, “I’d have to get up from my desk, find the right file cabinet and pull the file. Or worse yet, the file might be stored in the jail at the other side of the parking lot. With Laserfiche I save at least five hours a week, just for the searches I do.” Of course, Bernard does fewer searches now that Bozeman residents can locate records over the Web.

The city remains committed to educating its citizens on how to access the records. Says Fontenot, “We want to train people to search and retrieve our records. It takes the mystery out of city records, lends a great deal to our transparency and, once people are comfortable with and trust the process, the staff is free to work on other tasks.”

GIS Manager Henderson agrees, noting the time saved daily since installing Laserfiche. Previously, GIS staff would have to ask the clerk’s office for records. Now he can direct both staff and residents to do their own research over the Web. “I like to say that we’re empowering the staff and the citizens to help themselves. It’s wonderful to take someone with very little computer experience, show them just a little bit and have them be able to take it from there. Then they can show someone else how to do it.”

Currently, the city clerk’s office, GIS department, and planning department use Laserfiche. But Henderson has more ambitious plans. He envisions a system where even a novice computer user can use a single search to click on a location and pull up a deed, easement or any related document. “I’d like to see the whole city using Laserfiche within a map interface. I’d like staff to be able to click on a map point and have the search bring up all the associated documents.”

To achieve that goal, Bozeman will have to do some reorganization of its filing system, which depends on records that are not consistent. Document naming conventions and formats for meeting minutes, for example, have changed over the decades. Currently the city is exploring new ways to make the system more intuitive for users. “At least in Laserfiche,” says Henderson, “we can shuffle documents around really easily and use more fields in the templates to help us reorganize.”

Henderson looks forward to getting all the city departments to adopt Laserfiche. Next in line is the fire department. Henderson plans to modify the system so that firefighters can bring up an address and see all the related documents to determine, for example, whether there has been a fire there before. He also sees the potential in being able to store audio and video files.

“If you ask any of us,” says Henderson,” we’ll tell you we’re saving staff time, we’re saving resources and we’re making things available to the public in a more efficient way than ever before. I see a huge future with Laserfiche for us and the community as a whole.”

On the average, Mexican cities rely on federal government for approximately 85 percent of their funding. That means local income, generated from tax collection, usually only constitutes approximately 15 percent of city budgets. The average Mexican city depends heavily on the federal government for money because, in many cases, its tax collection efforts are lacking.

In 2001, the City of Acapulco, Mexico, sought to improve its tax collection methods and increase its operating income while decreasing reliance on federal funding. At the time, all the city’s documents — including property titles, land receipts and maps — were scattered throughout multiple offices and storage rooms. It was difficult to compare documents. The process often took days, since a formal request for information had to be made, the archives searched, photocopies made and information mailed. The city decided tax collection would become easier if those scattered documents and maps were coordinated in a system in which a tax receipt could be examined alongside maps of land parcels.

The Land and Taxes Department identified several recurring problems contributing to poor tax collection:

• Land property registries were not updated.
• Changes on the ownership and new property constructions were not reported to the Landing and Taxes Department.
• The property titles were inaccurate.
• Year-by-year accounts of individual land receipts were stored separately from the land property registries.

All of this resulted in many precious workday hours being spent determining which taxes were being paid properly, which land developments owed new taxes, and which didn’t. When the City of Acapulco decided to bring all of this information — land property registries, property titles, tax receipts, etc. — into a single digital interface, it contacted ESRI’s distributor in Mexico, Sistemas de Información Geográfica, S.A. (SIGSA). SIGSA was chosen because of the company’s experience with both mapping and imaging software.

First, the city needed to scan all of its records and make them available in a digital format. Since the city wanted to tie the images into another mapping interface, it had to make sure the images were stored in a non-proprietary document management software with an open architecture that would enable city programmers to easily create a custom integration. The City of Acapulco chose software from Laserfiche (Long Beach, California) because it met the open architecture requirements and had accomplished successful digital conversions in municipal records projects around the world.

The City of Acapulco then configured a GIS system utilizing ArcView and ArcIMS to map condominiums in the Golden and Diamond Zones, where most residential construction takes place in the city. City employees took panoramic pictures of the Acapulco coastline and each property front and digitized all the pictures with ArcView. The application works tridimensionally, mapping properties by location, level, and real estate value, which ranges from $250,000 (U.S.) to $1.1 million (U.S.).

After more than 550,000 land registry archives — property titles, tax property receipts and other legal documents — were digitized with Laserfiche software, the city linked the mapped ArcView parcels with the appropriate scanned documents. It also made all the scanned records available on-line through city of Acapulco’s Web site for citizen and notary access.

To improve its tax collection rate, the city of Acapulco needed to be able to point to a land parcel and easily pull all tax records associated with it. By developing geographic relationships between tax documents and each land parcel, Acapulco made keeping those records up-to-date much easier. Just by clicking on land parcels, Land and Taxes Department employees can get an easier handle on who owes taxes and who does not. They could also check the ArcView property pictures against tax records to see if all new construction has been properly taxed and collected.

By integrating GIS and document management solutions from ESRI and Laserfiche, the city of Acapulco increased its rate of tax collection four-fold without raising taxes. Thanks to these technological solutions, the city of Acapulco’s Land and Taxes Department has been transformed.

Today, the city of Acapulco has Mexico’s fourth-best tax collection ratio. During the period of 1999–2004, the tax collection rate increased 137 percent. The city’s income budget grew from 500 million pesos in 2000 to more than 1.1 billion pesos in 2004. The percentage of federally-sourced funds is approximately 52 percent federal, with the city generating nearly half its own funding. When the national tendency to rely on federal funds is taken into account, the city of Acapulco is doing an outstanding tax-collection job. The financial health of the city was also reflected by an A+ (Mex) rating from Standard and Poor’s and from Fitch in July 2003.

More than 240 millions pesos per year are coming from property and property registry taxes collection. Using the Internet and GIS, Acapulco has successfully linked geographic information with financial information.

The Chula Vista engineering department keeps detailed maps and drawings of individual land parcels that are often referred to by working developers and in order to complete work. When new developments are planned, professionals use the maps and drawings to check sewer pipe outlays, flood-prone areas, sanitation department zoning, and other information pertinent to the future housing of hundreds or thousands of citizens.

A higher workload mandated a digital way of life for the engineering department. As more land found itself the target of new developments, easier access to documentation of the city’s 49 square miles was needed. Previously untouched parcels had to be staked out for subterranean or logistical impediments to new development, necessitating greater attention to detail. The engineering department needed up-to-date, easily accessible map data in an interactive format that could be quickly changed with all the development taking place. Large scale drawings and minute numeric details shared equal importance.

The Engineering Department needed digital access to the complete details of city contracts, so the City of Chula Vista centralized its extensive collection of ESRI-based data—from ArcGIS and ArcInfo systems—with ArcIMS Viewer. Previously, the information was accessible only through an in-house browser, which was challenging for engineers spending a lot of time in the field. The customized ArcIMS Viewer used an ActiveX Connector and was dubbed internally as CV Mapper. Now the engineers could view and modify GIS data through a Web browser.

Engineers use CV Mapper to instantly check the Internet and find out if a parcel was within a flood zone, or what day of the week a street was being swept. The ArcIMS tool could also easily access work order data to check the specifics of new developments, such as a manufacturer’s phone number.

“We set up our ArcIMS Viewer to provide engineers with the basic GIS information and related work order specifics in a concise format suited to help facilitate quick decisions,” said Bob Blackwelder, the city’s Lead Programmer/Analyst. “We also saw an opportunity to add all the images from the map room, which was an extra trip engineers often had to make when researching a parcel.”

ArcIMS gave engineers the ability to pull up small but important details like manufacturer type from their desks or laptops. Blackwelder’s GIS team extended that functionality to include the construction maps and drawings.

The open-ended ArcIMS platform meshed easily with Laserfiche Document Imaging, the digital source of the city’s collection of maps and drawings. In 1999, the city contracted to have approximately 40,000 engineering related maps and documents indexed and scanned into the Laserfiche database, which includes a desktop program allowing users to search and display scanned documents. Laserfiche also had a dedicated Web-based thin-client, WebLink, deployable to browser-based work environments in a fashion similar to Chula Vista’s ArcIMS Viewer.

“All of the objects, properties, and methods developed by Laserfiche were at my disposal for incorporation into our CV Mapper,” Blackwelder said. “We only needed to add the appropriate WebLink methods and properties, and our document management system, which included the entire contents of the city map room, was a full-fledged part of our ArcIMS tool.”

Chula Vista engineers use ArcIMS to get storm pipe size, type, width, material and other specifics that can be expressed in a searchable value, while they use WebLink to pull detailed, lengthy documents like original blueprints. The integration between ArcIMS and WebLink lets engineers find the curve schematics of a drain pipe at the same time they determine its width.

To achieve one-click compatibility between Laserfiche and ArcIMS, the drawings were spatially-enabled and layered with corresponding GIS base map information. A Chula Vista technician linked the unique work order number on each construction drawing into the appropriate project by using ArcIMS Viewer to screen-digitize the project boundary and add the work order ID found on the drawing. This created a definitive relationship between the drawings and the geographic images.

Engineers use ArcView to zoom into a specific area, then enter a work order number and run a search for all associated construction drawings, without needing to open another application. This allows engineers to view all documents and maps associated with a project in real time. And the Chula Vista GIS staff only had to install the thin-client Laserfiche WebLink once on their Dell 2500 server, deploying it instantly to the city’s entire fleet of Pentium PCs.

By configuring ArcView to access all of these construction drawings, Blackwelder and his GIS team put all of the city’s engineering resources at users’ fingertips. Now, engineers get those little intangibles that help them pinpoint a problem when it occurs. In the event of a flood or leak, engineers use ArcView to quickly examine georeferenced characteristics of the affected location, then click on a hyperlink to Laserfiche to review a construction drawing and determine how far a sewer is beneath the surface; how a main slopes; or where pipes are connected. These fractious details help explain a sewage problem and expedite a solution. They also help ensure that Chula Vista’s many new developments are built in the safest areas possible.

Blackwelder and his GIS team continue to devise more ways to simultaneously put geographic information and digital images at users’ fingertips.

“Our Building and Housing Department would like to use the ArcIMS Viewer with our Permits Plus database to quickly display documents associated with building permit status or code violations,” Blackwelder said. “The Planning Department is looking forward to viewing detailed assessor parcel maps on the same browser as the GIS map.”