Town Hall improves document access

LAKEWOOD RANCH — As Lakewood Ranch CDD 6 Supervisor Jim Hill prepares for a meeting, he turns on a tablet device and pulls up the morning’s agenda.

“I love it,” Hill said. “It’s ecological and it’s convenient. It simplifies things.”

Since June, Lakewood Ranch community development district supervisors, Lakewood Ranch Town Hall staff, attorneys and the district engineer have used the devices to review agenda documents during meetings.

Town Hall invested $3,500 for 11 tablets, and already the savings are adding up. It saves between $600 and $1,000 monthly on printing costs.

Clerk Jessica Mears went from printing 83 agenda packets for each monthly meeting to printing 10 (four for supervisors who want hard copies and six for media/resident review and official records).

“We actually can be more flexible with our agenda development, as well,” Town Hall Executive Director Eva Rey said. “We can (better accommodate) last-minute changes.”

But the devices were just the first step in a bigger plan to make Lakewood Ranch Town Hall more transparent. Lakewood Ranch Town Hall already posts agendas and supplemental information, including contracts and financial statements, on its website. However, Rey said Town Hall has purchased a scanner so the clerk can convert old paper files to digital ones, giving the public access to records from throughout the community’s development, not just since the creation of the online document library in 2012.

“We can go back in time now and start retrieving the stored documents, getting them online and cleaning up the storage,” Rey said. “It will be a gradual effort.”

“It’s a transparency issue for me,” she said. “If someone wants to go back and look at the history of a particular district or documents of a particular issue, I want them to be able to access that through the document library. It’s a more efficient way to conduct business.”

Contact Pam Eubanks at [email protected].