CITY MANAGER’S REPORT
Week ending February 27, 2009
Draft Balanced Scorecard
Staff has been working on implementation of a performance management system and has compiled a draft balanced scorecard for 2007 and 2008. The scorecard contains performance indicators related to each of the City Commission’s goals and focuses on four different areas - operational performance, customer feedback, financial performance, and employee readiness and growth. This document is a working draft as staff is continuing to develop methods to collect and report data. Staff welcomes direction from the City Commission as to whether we are asking the right questions and what our goals should be for these indicators.
Development Services Division 2008 Financial Report
The attached memo reports building permit fee revenues and expenditures for the Planning and Development Services Department, Development Services Division, in regulating building activity in the 2008 calendar year. A detailed list of revenues and expenditures reasonably related to the regulation of building activity within the City is included as part of this report.
2008 Fire Medical incident type report
The attached report and chart illustrate the number and types of emergency calls responded to by the Fire Medical Department in 2008. Nearly all types of emergency calls increased in number from the previous year, and the total number increased by 8.5%, to 9,799.
City web site gets wiki as City Service Directory replacement
On Jan. 29, the City of Lawrence’s web site at lawrenceks.org moved its city service directory into a wiki - a collection of web pages enabled so anyone can contribute or modify content. The software behind the city’s wiki is the same as that of the popular web site, Wikipedia. Wiki software is important to the city for two reasons:
1. It encourages and enables user interaction with the web site instead of one-way communication;
2. The increased number of contributors to a wiki tend to lead to better “breadth, depth and quality” of content.
The wiki has a localized search engine, an additional feature over the previous city service directory which did not. Another feature of the wiki is a list of popular pages, dynamically generated by how many times a page is viewed. This information is valuable to city staff. By knowing what content is being viewed most often, city staff can get a better understanding as to what people are looking for when they visit the city web site and use that data to help improve navigation and quality of content on the web site.
Programming for the feature was completed by eGov Coordinator Eric Gruber, who also monitors the wiki to ensure changes made do not violate the city’s Rules for Posting Content.
Yard trimmings collection begins Monday, March 2
During the winter months when yard trimmings are not collected separately solid waste crews undergo additional training activities. Yard trimmings collection will start back up on Monday, March 2. Solid Waste crews will make the weekly pick ups on Mondays through December. Yard trimmings, grass clippings, leaves, and small, brushy and garden debris, are not sent to the landfill but are transported directly to the city's Wood Recycling and Compost Facility. Only cans, carts and compostable paper bags may be used for yard trimmings for curbside collection. Yard trimmings will not be collected on regular trash day. Yard trimmings set out on a regular trash collection day or in plastic bags will be tagged and left.
The separate collection of yard trimmings is an important part of the city’s environmental efforts – recycling a significant portion of overall waste and extending the life of the landfill. 2008 was the fourth year of the “preferred container program,” where yard waste was collected at the curb in cans, carts, or compostable bags. The community achieved a 99.1% compliance rate with preferred container set outs. Community-wide collection of yard waste on a single day remains challenging for solid waste crews, but the high compliance with preferred container requirements makes the collection process safer and much more efficient, as well as improving the final quality of the compost. Compost distribution events continue to be very popular and a valuable way of returning this resource to the community. Compost is given away free to self-loading customers, or sold for $10 per pickup truck load if the city loads it.
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Pedestrian signal installed on New Hampshire Street near Arts Center
Pursuant to City Commission direction, a HAWK (High Intensity Activated Crosswalk) pedestrian signal was installed on the 1000 block of New Hampshire Street between the parking garage and the Arts Center. Please see attached photos of the installation.
Ohio Street brick reconstruction project honored
The city has received notification that the Ohio Street brick reconstruction project has been selected for an American Public Works Association (APWA) Project of the Year Award in the Historic Restoration/Preservation category.
Panhandling update
On December 9, 2008 the City Commission discussed issues related to panhandling in the City of Lawrence and more specifically its downtown area. Staff was directed to provide an update to the Commission in February, which is contained in the attached memo.
Energy efficiency grant may help conversion of traffic signals to LED lamps
The City of Lawrence Traffic Engineering Division was the first in Kansas to start using LED lamps in traffic signals and the first to require their use in all new traffic signal installations and upgrades. Our program began in the mid-1990’s. To date, nearly 71% of all the traffic signal indications in the city are LED and all new installations are 100% LED. An analysis of three of the earliest converted intersections estimates that the energy savings is approximately $975 annually per intersection. Staff is currently working on the application for “State and Local Energy Efficiency Grant” under the “American Restoration and Recovery Act of 2009” to complete the conversion of all remaining traffic signal lights to LED. See attached memo for more information.