City Council Meeting Prep: There’s an App for That [VIDEO]

LaTricia Woods serves as Public Information Officer for the City of Maricopa, Ariz. Previously, she served as Assistant to the City Manager in the City of Scottsdale and Public Information Officer for the City of Wichita. Her career expertise includes public relations, strategic and crisis communications and marketing for government, nonprofit and media organizations.

Embracing New Technology

The Maricopa City Council has always looked to technology as a way to enhance the way it meets the needs of the community. With the growing success of the iPad, many Council members wanted to turn in the laptop and try the new device. In a relatively short amount of time, the entire City Council had asked to switch. Once that happened, they began exploring different apps that would help them carry out their responsibilities.

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Governing on the iPad with iLegislate

Every day, more and more government agencies are adopting the iPad. Why shouldn’t they? It’s mobile, it’s dependable, and the number of government apps is growing at a fast pace. Granicus recognized this trend and released an iPad app called iLegislate into Beta last year to see how effective it could be at helping governments save paper while improving meeting efficiency.

I’m pleased to report that Granicus just released iLegislate into full production. Now, any government agency can leverage the iLegislate app and Granicus solutions to replace paper-based agenda packets with a more mobile, action-driven, and cost-saving alternative.

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Town of Prescott Valley Excels with Council Voting Solution

In late 2009, the Town of Prescott Valley, AZ built a high tech Auditorium/Council Chambers and wanted to incorporate the latest technologies to enhance government transparency and maximize their “going green” efforts. For nearly four years, Prescott Valley has been successfully streaming their council meetings on the Web with Granicus; the obvious next step was to add some new features to help them further streamline their Council meeting process with automated, paperless workflows.

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City Provides Council With a “Snapshot of What Constituents Feel on a Specific Subject”

Arcata helped us pioneer and define our citizen participation tool. They worked with us to determine the success of this product: What elements worked? What should be improved? What should we eliminate? I was anxious to get Deborah Musick, Executive Assistant to the City Manager, and her team on the phone to hear more about the decision-making process and the challenges that lead them to eComment.

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Our Previous Meeting Process Was "Old-school"

We worked with City of Hesperia to highlight the success they’ve seen since brining Granicus to the city. I spoke with Melinda Sayre-Castro, Assistant City Clerk, and learned the challenges they faced prior to Granicus and the results they’ve seen since. Melinda has been with the city since 2006 and worked briefly in HR before moving to the City Clerk’s office. She holds a Masters in Public Administration and says one of her favorite hobbies is spending quality time with her family.

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City of Reading Engages the Public

The City of Reading, PA has brought on four meeting bodies – City Council, Planning Commission, Historical Architectural Review Board, and Zoning – leveraging the Government Transparency Suite to keep citizens informed through a convenient media portal of public meetings. They also recently received some positive news coverage about this.

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Prescott Valley, AZ Gets New Auditorium for Town Meetings and Upgrades Technology

After two years of constructing a new town auditorium and council chambers located in their newly built 40,000-square-foot library, the Prescott Valley Town Council also unveiled a brand-new voting system to outfit their new digs! I recently trained Council Members on the new system, which included seven voting stations. Training was a smashing success! Council Members were excited to upgrade their meeting chambers and their voting processes.

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