One of the four new city jobs proposed by the city last October was approved to be filled at Tuesday night’s council meeting.
The council voted four to one to fill the position, which it had asked Finance Director Bruce Moe to address in his mid-year update of the budget.
The positions had been proposed by City Manager Mark Danaj and approved by the council last year. However, Danaj announced that he wouldn’t fill the positions after public outcry over the proposed cost. Staff projected that the position would have a salary of $242,000, including benefits.
Currently, information systems is a division inside the finance department. An outside consultant suggested creating a stand alone department and the position in 2013.
The consultant, Terry Hackelman of NexLevel Information Technology, was present at Tuesday night’s meeting. He said someone with the clout of a director was necessary to balance request from department heads. A director would also “allow staff to stay focused on the right priorities,” he said.
According to the staff report, the position would oversee a department whose duties include “alignment of information technology resources to support citywide business processes and strategic direction as well as the use of technology to enhance community engagement, track and measure customer service requests, leverage open data initiatives, and explore opportunities to digitize the city services upon a foundation of transparency and access.”
Danaj said the position was “one of the most important positions we could create.” Both he and Moe pointed to a list of IT-related tasks that they said have been held up because staff has had to focus on day to day duties. They included automated tracking of public record requests, security encryption, webpage overhaul, “leveraging open data initiatives to foster greater transparency and reduce the city expense and public wait time associated with public record requests,” financial system upgrades and social media, among others, according to the staff report.
Mayor Wayne Powell said these tasks were “designed to reduce costs and make things more efficient.” Echoing some of the comments made by his colleagues who were in favor of creating the position, he said that holding off on hiring someone would be “penny-wise and dollar-foolish.”
Councilmember David Lesser, who had the sole dissenting vote and voted against filling the positions in October, said that the conversation felt like “deja-vu.”
He said that although he supports having the position, he thought the council should wait for the creation of next year’s budget in May to involve the public in the decision-making process.
“I think we need to study this in context of the whole budget,” he said to a burst of applause from Bill Victor, a resident who is running against Lesser in next month’s council election and who was sitting in the audience.
In March, the city has invited residents to participate in a community priority-setting meeting for the budget. ER
