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HomeMy WebLinkAbout03/19/2012 Staff: City Council Members: Rhonda Smiley, Assistant to the City Manager Sue Benham, Chair Jacquie Sullivan Rudy Salas Regular Meeting of the Legislative and Litigation Committee of the City Council – City of Bakersfield Monday, March 19, 2012 12:00 p.m. City Hall North First Floor – Conference Room A 1600 Truxtun Avenue, Bakersfield CA 93301 A G E N D A 1. ROLL CALL 2. ADOPT FEBRUARY 21, 2012 AGENDA SUMMARY REPORT 3. PUBLIC STATEMENTS 4. DEFERRED BUSINESS A. Discussion and Recommendation Regarding the Ordinance Prohibiting Parking at Bus Stops – Rojas B. Discussion and Recommendation Regarding Electronic Communications – Smiley / Tandy / Gennaro 5. COMMITTEE COMMENTS 6. ADJOURNMENT City Council Members: Rhonda Smiley, Assistant to the City Manager Sue Benham, Chair Jacquie Sullivan Rudy Salas AGENDA SUMMARY REPORT Special Meeting of the LEGISLATIVE AND LITIGATION COMMITTEE Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - 12:00 p.m. City Hall North First Floor – Conference Room A 1600 Truxtun Avenue, Bakersfield, CA 93301 The meeting was called to order at 12:00 PM. 1. ROLL CALL Present: Councilmember Sue Benham, Chair Councilmember Jacquie Sullivan Councilmember Rudy Salas Staff Present: Alan Tandy, City Manager Ginny Gennaro, City Attorney Rhonda Smiley, Asst. to the City Manager Andrew Heglund, Deputy City Attorney Steven Teglia, Asst. to the City Manager Richard Iger, Associate Attorney Chris Huot, Administrative Analyst Jessalee Talley, Associate Attorney Roberta Gafford, City Clerk Marian Shaw, Civil Engineer Eddie Chavez, Interim I.T. Director John Ussery, Engineer Nick Fidler, General Services Superintendent Others Present: Stan Scharry, Independent Living Center Steve Smith, KBAK Patrick Murphy, Independent Living Center Antonie Boessenkool, Bakersfield Californian Carole Peeker, Independent Living Center Shawn Kennemer, New Advances for People with Disabilities Legislative and Litigation Committee Agenda Summary Report February 21, 2012 Page 2 2. ADOPT OCTOBER 24, 2011 AGENDA SUMMARY REPORT Adopted as submitted 3. PUBLIC STATEMENTS None 4. DEFERRED BUSINESS None 5. NEW BUSINESS A. Discussion and Recommendation Regarding the Ordinance Prohibiting Parking at Bus Stops – Gennaro / Underwood City Attorney Ginny Gennaro stated there is a current ordinance prohibiting parking in front of bus stops. The ordinance makes parking in front of bus stops illegal if the curb is stenciled with the words “No Standing” and if there is appropriate signage in place. If the curb is painted red, no parking is allowed. However, buses are exempted when pulling in front of a bus stop. She indicated the current ordinance can be amended, if the Committee decides to recommend it. Civil Engineer Marian Shaw stated that there are currently approximately 650 existing bus stops. GET is currently reorganizing, adding new bus stops and eliminating existing bus stops. It is estimated that 450 bus tops will remain; 200 of those bus stops will be in areas that allow parking on the street. Committee Chair Sue Benham asked which option was most costly, painting the curbs red or placing proper signage. Traffic Engineer John Ussery stated painting the curbs red would be the more expensive option, as the curbs would have to be maintained and repainted every two to three years. Signage would be the least expensive over time. The approximate cost for a sign and installation is $200 and each bus stop would require two signs. GET has indicated a willingness to assist in the installation of the signage, although a specific dollar amount has not been discussed, to date. City Manager Alan Tandy stated in order to minimize the expense, staff would begin placing signage at locations where known problems currently exist and at any location reported as having this type of issue. General Services Superintendent Nick Fidler stated GET that reorganizes their bus stop locations on a recurring basis. It would be necessary for staff to remove signs and place new signs, if needed, from old bus stops to new bus stops. Legislative and Litigation Committee Agenda Summary Report February 21, 2012 Page 3 Stan Scharry, representing the Independent Living Center, stated GET has informed their organization that the routes and bus stops will be reorganized in October 2012. Mr. Scharry also stated a blind individual using public transportation is taught to use landmarks and count steps. A parked vehicle in a bus stop zone causes great confusion for these individuals and is dangerous. Mr. Scharry stated there are various locations in need of signage, including: the Center for the Blind on Baker and Monterey, the Department of Rehabilitation, and the Social Security Offices at Office Park Drive and Truxtun Avenue. Patrick Murphy, a vocational counselor at Independent Living Center, stated the blind, including himself, are taught to count steps and other various techniques in order to be mobile. If a vehicle parked in a bus stop zone causes a bus to stop a distance from the original bus stop, it can disorient someone who has been taught otherwise. Mr. Murphy recommended signage also be placed at medical suites, hospitals, and shopping centers. Committee member Jacquie Sullivan stated that prioritizing the bus stops where there are problems will help minimize the expense. Committee member Salas asked if the Public Works Department would be in charge of the review process, which Mr. Tandy confirmed. Committee Chair Benham requested that Public Works staff stay in contact with GET to acquire a listing of the final routes identified. She also requested that staff work with the members of the Independent Living Center to identify the high priority locations needing curb painting while GET finalizes their reorganization. An update is to be presented at the next committee meeting. Committee member Sullivan made a motion to have the City Attorney’s office amend the language in the City’s ordinance to prohibit parking in front of bus stops if the curb is painted red or marked with the words “Bus Zone” and forwarded to the full Council for consideration. The motion was unanimously approved. B. Discussion and Recommendation Regarding Electronic Communications – Gennaro / Tandy City Attorney Gennaro provided a summary of the City’s current e-mail retention policy. The City’s policy is consistent with a number of policies in other jurisdictions. City Manager Alan Tandy stated that staff conducted a survey of Kern County cities regarding their e-mail retention policies, at the request of Committee member Salas. Most of them have no policies, and one city has a policy similar to the City’s. In addition, staff has contacted both the local Caltrans office and the State of California Records Management Program (CalRIM) regarding their policies. Both distinguish between e-mails that are categorized as official records and transitory records, with the later being deleted after 90 days. Legislative and Litigation Committee Agenda Summary Report February 21, 2012 Page 4 Committee Chair Benham asked if the City has a written policy that defines specifically what kinds of e-mails are public records and should be saved, and if employees receive training on the policy. City Attorney Gennaro stated the current policy could be improved and that the City could do a better job of educating employees on what they should keep. Committee Chair Benham requested staff review the policy and report back on how it can be strengthened and used to educate employees on the retention of e-mails that the public should have access to. City Manager Tandy stated there are various methods that are currently in place for employees to save records, including: making hard copies, storing to their computer drives, and storing to the Laserfiche system. If the policy was modified to a mandatory retention for an indefinite amount of time, the costs would be excessive. The majority of those costs would be for the staff time necessary to recover and review documentation, rather than storage costs of retention. Committee Chair Benham also requested staff contact the City of Fresno and report back on the workability of their system and the related costs, including staff time and taxpayer dollars. She also stated that the important principle in this matter is the public’s access to the information. Committee member Jacquie Sullivan stated she agreed that certain e-mails do not need to be kept indefinitely and doing so reduces efficiency. Committee member Rudy Salas requested staff review the policy and report back on the feasibility of strengthening it in accordance with State Government Code 34090. He also requested staff find out what the costs and issues would be to implement a cap on mailbox size for each employee, whereby the individual can choose how long they would like to retain certain e-mails. Committee member Salas also requested staff provide him an electronic version of the memorandums included in this committee meeting packet. C. Discussion and Recommendation Regarding the 2012 Committee Calendar – Smiley Adopted as submitted 6. COMMITTEE COMMENTS None 7. ADJOURNMENT The meeting adjourned at 12:54 cc: Honorable Mayor and City Council G:\GROUPDAT\Lyn\MEMO\Alan\2012\LandLResponse-BusStopSignage-final.docx CITY OF BAKERSFIELD MEMORANDUM TO: Alan Tandy, City Manager FROM: Raul Rojas, Public Works Director DATE: March 19, 2012 SUBJECT: “No Parking at Bus Stops” and the GET Reorganization Responses to Legislative and Litigation Committee Requests At the February 21, 2012 Legislative and Litigation Committee meeting, Councilmember Benham requested that staff work with the members of the Independent Living Center to obtain a list of bus stop locations where parking was an issue to those with disabilities. Mr. Stan Scharry provided a list of eight locations for Public Works to review. See below for a table summarizing the locations and existing conditions at each. Bus Stop Location Existing Conditions Proposed Changes Baker 64' south of Monterey (northbound) Timed Parking Allowed Leave Timed Parking Baker 64' south of Monterey (southbound) Timed Parking Allowed Install 140' No Parking Monterey east of Baker (eastbound) Parking Allowed Install 80' No Parking Niles east of Baker (westbound) No Parking 100' at bus stop No Changes Necessary H Street 200' north of Fairview (southbound) No Parking Anytime No Changes Necessary H Street 200' north of Fairview (northbound) No Parking Anytime No Changes Necessary Office Park 90' south of Truxtun Ave. (southbound) No Parking Anytime No Changes Necessary Ridgeview High School (southbound) No Parking Anytime No Changes Necessary Of the eight locations, five were already designated as “No Parking” zones. Of the three remaining bus stop locations, staff has implemented the process to install “No Parking” signs at the bus stop on Baker Street (southbound) adjacent to the Center For the Blind, and at the covered bus stop on Monterey Street east of Baker Street. Public Works staff also recommends leaving the existing timed parking on Baker Street for northbound traffic, as to not place undue hardship on the adjacent bank, which utilizes those spaces for customer parking. Other than Mr. Scharry’s recommendations, no other phone calls or complaints have been received concerning this issue. Public Works will continue to monitor these requests and respond on a case by case basis as the need arises. Lastly, Public Works will remain in contact with GET as they get closer to their planned fall 2012 bus route reorganization. When a final list of bus stop locations is provided, staff will work with the Independent Living Center to identify new locations where “No Parking” signs should be installed. CITY MANAGER’S OFFICE MEMORANDUM March 13, 2012 TO: Legislative and Litigation Committee Councilmember Sue Benham, Chair Councilmember Rudy Salas Councilmember Jacquie Sullivan FROM: Alan Tandy, City Manager SUBJECT: Electronic Communications – Responses to Committee Member Requests from the February 21, 2012 Legislative and Litigation Committee Meeting At the February 21, 2012 Legislative and Litigation Committee, the committee members posed a series of requests for additional information related to the discussion of the City’s e-mail retention policy. This memorandum will address those questions, as follows: 1. Councilmember Benham asked for staff’s recommendations as to how the City’s current e-mail retention policies can be strengthened and clarified. Staff agrees with the Committee that it would be beneficial to clarify the City’s email retention policy for our employees through a training program. We are currently in the process of formulating a course on that subject for all City employees who utilize a computer as part of their job responsibilities. Such a training program would also address the issue posed by Councilmember Salas relating to Government Code section 340901 in that the training will help employees understand what documents constitute public records, so they can better determine what types of emails they should save, using the various methods that are available to do so. Past experience has proven that training for a large segment of City employees is most effectively done through electronic presentation, via the City’s intranet system. Utilizing this method, employees can easily access and complete the required training directly from their work computers at a time when it does not disrupt their work schedule. They do not have to physically leave their work stations to go to a group class. It is an efficient and reliable way to provide training, and allows us the capability to accurately monitor and confirm that the required training has been properly completed. As previously mentioned, staff is in the process of developing a course of training, in collaboration with the Information Technology Division, and proposes to implement it in the near future. 1 This section is generally referred to for the proposition that city records (undefined) must be retained for at least two years. Legislation and Litigation Committee March 15, 2012 Page 2 2. Councilmember Benham requested that staff contact the City of Fresno to inquire as to how they view their e-mail retention policy and related issues, from both a time and taxpayer perspective. Staff has contacted management staff in the Fresno City Manager’s Office and Information Technology Division. As explained in the report previously provided at the February 21, 2012 Committee meeting, the City of Fresno currently retains all employee e-mails indefinitely. However, they are in the process of re-visiting their policy due to a number of concerns, which will be further explained below.  The e-mail retention software used by Fresno is known as Symantec Enterprise Vault. The cost to implement the system was approximately $167,000 (including licensing, labor, and related training). In addition, they incurred approximately $25,000 in expenses for new servers. Annual maintenance costs are approximately $28,000 per year. There are approximately 3,000 users on their e-mail system.  Fresno implemented a formal policy specifically related to e-mail retention in June 2010. They began the practice of keeping all e-mails indefinitely when they started the migration of their e-mail system from Groupwise to Outlook in late 2008 to mid 2009. Currently, their system holds all employee e-mails from 2009 to the present, along with any earlier e-mails that may have been in employees’ in-boxes at the time of the migration. “All” e-mails means everything, including items that have been received, sent, retracted, and deleted by the users.  However, as previously mentioned, Fresno is currently analyzing their policy related to the indefinite retention of all e-mails. According to management staff, they are concerned that indefinite retention may become problematic in terms of retrieval, from a technical, time, and expense perspective. Their e-mail policy states that their archiving system is subject to “reasonable guidelines” as defined by the State of California Records Management Guidelines. It further defines the guidelines as five years, or whenever disk space runs out, or it becomes too costly to store five years of information. Should any of those circumstances occur, the policy allows for a more reasonable time period to be set.  One of their major concerns is that public records requests have increased significantly. While they do not have specific data to quantify the increase, staff indicates that because there is such a high volume of Public Records Act requests on a regular basis, if all the staff time necessary to respond to the requests were calculated, it would likely equate to a full time position. Staff from the City Clerk’s, Finance, Police Department, Public Works, and City Manager’s Offices are routinely involved in the process of responding to PRA requests. They also indicate that the majority of the requests are from the media. The staff time spent addressing the records requests is in addition to the media requests for interviews that may be related to the requested subject matter. Legislation and Litigation Committee March 15, 2012 Page 3  As a result of these issues, after retaining all e-mails since mid-2009 (a period of less than three years), Fresno may consider revising their practice of keeping all emails indefinitely by instituting the “reasonable guidelines” included in their current policy. Their staff indicates any revision will likely result in a five year retention period, in keeping with their standards for retention of other documents. 3. Councilmember Salas requested that staff examine the policy utilized by some State agencies that limits the size of the user’s email box to determine the practicality of applying such a policy for the City’s e-mail system. The Microsoft Exchange System allows for universal or individual quotas to be set on a user’s mailbox. Setting a size limit on a user’s mailbox, so that the user can no longer receive or send new messages beyond a certain capacity, is possible. However, there are some major drawbacks with this type of policy. One of those issues is that of actually determining what the capacity limits would be. Depending on what an employee’s job position and requirements are, the number and size of the e-mails they receive and send can vary greatly. The size of emails received is an important consideration. If the employee receives emails with large attachments, their inbox would likely be filled to capacity far sooner than others. The only way to mitigate those issues would be to make exceptions for employees who routinely receive large attachments. However, this would create administrative and efficiency issues, as, inevitably, adjustments would have to continually be evaluated and approved on a case by case basis. The City currently has 1,355 inboxes. Using a conservative estimate, if only 5% of the City’s employees required an increase in their mailbox capacity, Information Technology staff would have to administer 68 mailboxes individually. Even with a procedure in place for employees to request a change in their mailbox quota size, it would likely become a repeated occurrence, and the exceptions would likely increase over time, negating the intent of the policy. Regardless of universal or individual quotas, if this type of policy were to be implemented at a specifically determined size, the inbox would not allow email to be sent or received when the limit is reached, until the size of the inbox is lowered below the set size. It would be the individual employee’s responsibility to keep their inboxes clean and within the limit. If the employee happened to be on vacation or extended leave and the mailbox reached capacity, no mail would be received. The sender would receive an email notice stating that their email could not be delivered, due to the receiver’s inbox being full. This could mean a loss of important and, in some circumstances, critical, information, which could prove to be detrimental to City business and operations. As a public agency, the City wishes to be fully responsive to our citizens and to the various entities with which we conduct business. Summary  Staff concurs with the Committee recommendation that the City’s e-mail policies should be clearly defined and communicated to our employees, and we propose to do so through the educational procedures described in this memorandum. Legislation and Litigation Committee March 15, 2012 Page 4  In consideration of the issues the City of Fresno is experiencing, as well as other concerns that were previously discussed at the February 21, 2012 Committee meeting, staff does not recommend implementation of a policy to retain emails indefinitely.  Finally, for the reasons stated in this report, staff does not recommend implementation of a procedure that would limit the size of the user’s mailbox, as it could result in the inability to receive or send information that may be important to City operations. AT:RS DOCUMENTS HANDED OUT AT THE COMMITTEE MEETING