Online Staff Reports Coming to Sierra Madre City Website

In an effort to “increase and broaden community involvement and trust,” plans have now been made to make more public documents available on on the City of Sierra Madre website, including vast amounts of content from .

In a presentation by Toni Buckner, the city's director of library services tuesday the city council was presented with three options to assist in the process of making documents conveniently available online.

The first option presented was to utilize the Tyler Content Management System which organizes scanned documents and creates an indexing system that would allow for quick retrieval of achieved minutes, resolutions, ordinances and reports. One benefit of this option, according to city staff, is that the system would integrate well with other city software which is also made by the Tyler company.

Another option option, while less expensive up front but more time consuming, was to have city employees use a combination of programs such as Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat Pro and Photoshop to create electronic documents suitable for the current .

After review,the council agreed with the staff recommendation to use the Tyler system.

Making such documents readily available to the public is “just good customer service,” Mayor John Buchanan said, adding that it supports government transparency and fulfills an important objective in the City’s Strategic Plan.

Presently, City Council Meeting agenda packets are available at City Hall, the public

Telecasts of city council meetings also appear on SMTV, channel 3 and online via the KGEM.tv website.

The council unanimously approved a motion allowing staff to license the Tyler Content Management System for an amount not to exceed $40,000 in costs of transferring documents electronically.

There will also be a cost of $5,000 allotted for a new computer server and a $30,000 one-time cost for licensing the software.