AGENDA #5e
MEMORANDUM
TO: Mayor and Town Council
FROM: W. Calvin Horton, Town Manager
SUBJECT: Response to Petition Requesting Access to Town Council Email and that the Town Publish Detailed Financial Information on the Town’s Web Site
DATE: January 9, 2006
The purpose of this memorandum is to provide a response to a citizen request for expanded distribution of Town Council email and for publishing financial information from the Town’s electronic financial management system.
BACKGROUND
At the Town Council meeting on November 21, 2005, Mr. Will Raymond presented a petition requesting that he receive email sent by Town staff to Town Council Members, as had been done while he was a candidate for Town Council, and that a process be established so that other citizens could have similar access.
Mr. Raymond further requested that the Town Council direct the Town Manager to publish on the web, by the end of the year [2005], the detailed financial and categorized financial information from the MUNIS financial management system so citizens could evaluate whether the Town made wise expenditures during the year. Mr. Raymond indicated the information would be important in evaluating budget requests submitted in 2006.
Council Email Distribution
The Town Manager and staff provide Town Council members with information about Town events and issues through a variety of means. Telephone messages, printed material delivered by mail or to pickup boxes at Town Hall, and email are routinely used depending on the nature and urgency of the information. Copies of most materials are kept at Town Hall and are available for public review.
Email is used for certain items as a matter of convenience rather than a function of content. The emails range from simple text messages to scanned attachments. The distribution of email to Council Members is based on a list of email addresses kept by the Town Manager’s staff. There is no centralized or automated process for these messages. It is simply an extension of routine day-to-day communications from the Town Manager to Town Council Members.
Although Mr. Raymond has referred to this email distribution as a “Council list-serv” it is not a server-based or automated mailing list service. The Town operates a mail server for staff support but does not operate a mailing list service or “list-serv” for staff or public use. Adding Mr. Raymond to the distribution list that is used for the Council is a simple step but converting the process to handle any citizen or public request to add, change, or delete entries is not.
The Town provides on the Town web site a place for citizens to sign up for email notification about certain items. This is a “notification only” process to alert recipients that there is new information about a specific topic on the Town web site. Because it is not intended for email distribution and does not handle attachments, it has not been used for the Council distribution process.
One solution to the petition request to provide public access to emails sent to the Council is to convert the email to a suitable format and post it on the Town web site. This can be done with existing technology resources, but the process would require additional time each day for Town staff to modify and post the messages. Our initial estimate is that the equivalent of one-half work day per week would be required by the web staff. One notable issue with posting the messages is the accessibility of email addresses listed in the postings which then become available for unintended purposes such as spam list scavenging.
A second solution to the petition request would be for Town Staff to set up a mailing list management server. This would be a dedicated computer application that automates the work of maintaining lists of email addresses and sending email to all of them. In other words, this would implement a system that Mr. Raymond refers to in his petition as a listserv.
The mailing list manager would allow citizens to subscribe to particular email lists. Citizens would use web page forms to subscribe or unsubscribe from the list by completing a form and clicking the "Submit" button. One set of subscribe/unsubscribe forms could be used for all mailing lists, using simple checkboxes to indicate which lists a citizen would like to subscribe or unsubscribe. One of the lists could include the correspondence that is sent from the Town Manager to Council.
Town staff (in the Manager's office in this example) would simply send relevant email to the email list's address and it would be automatically distributed to all subscribers.
The Town Information Office is currently using a limited version of this type of software through our web site. It is operated by our web site host and does not have the full range of capabilities that a mailing list manager would have.
We are considering a particular setup for a listserv for the Town’s use, specifically one that is generally described as "broadcast" or "one to many", where only the Manager’s staff and Council Members could send email to the list, not everybody who is on the subscription list.
Publishing Financial Information
The Town operates on a fiscal year beginning on July 1 and ending on June 30. The budget for each year is approved by the Town Council by June 30 as required by state statute. Within 90 days of adoption, the approved budget document is published and made available to the public on the Town’s web site and in limited quantities as a printed document.
Inclusion of line item budget detail for each department in the budget is neither required nor recommended by the professional associations and agencies that review or audit the Town’s budget. In order to ensure the public has a level of detail that goes beyond the regulatory agencies’ recommendations, the Town publishes a supplemental document to the annual budget that provides the line item detail for each Town department. This document is available on the Town’s web site for the FY 2005-2006 budget. History for FY 2004-2005 expenditures per line item also is shown.
The Town uses a third-party financial management system called MUNIS. The MUNIS program is an enterprise client-server database system with specific user licensing restrictions and security controls. It is used to plan, analyze and execute the Town’s annual budget. It provides a formal process for requesting, authorizing, and paying for services and goods used by each department. The system was not designed for direct public access. It does have reporting tools that were designed to provide periodic and on-demand reports for management, accounting, and audit reports. These reporting tools are used to prepare a number of public documents including our Town quarterly financial reports. The Town’s financial system, like other local government financial systems, was not designed as a free-standing citizen query database.
However, monthly we produce line item detail for all Town revenues and expenditures. Reports on those revenues and expenditures are accessed by Town departments through the MUNIS system. That reporting information can be prepared in hardcopy or electronic form for citizens.
RECOMMENDATIONS
We believe a Town operated mailing list manager server for purposes of providing a one-way distribution of information, would be an effective tool to afford the public timely access to Town information and would complement the web and email systems and services already in place. To allow an evaluation of this proposal, we recommend a three-month evaluation period be established to allow testing of related equipment and software. During this time we will evaluate ways to disseminate Town information through this process. At the end of the evaluation we will report back to the Council with recommendations regarding its suitability for the Town and in particular regarding its ability to provide the information requested by the petition.
In the interim we do not propose to change the public records storage process now in place. The Council’s email correspondence continues to be available for public access in the Town Clerk’s office as has been the case for a number of years and all citizens have an opportunity to review it.
In regard to the financial information request, we believe the financial documents currently available on the web or in published form are sufficient to allow public scrutiny of the Town’s budget. Revenues and expenditures to date can be reviewed each month at the line item level of detail throughout the year by request to the Finance Director.
ATTACHMENTS