When Barack Obama started his new gig last month, his aides were floored to find themselves in a technological time warp. The Bush White House, it seems, had been stuck in the early 2000s—no IM, no Facebook—and Obama’s staffers were expected to get to work without laptops or Blackberrys.
The council may not be known for robust debate, but all those aye votes do yield a staggering amount of paperwork. Each month aldermen consider hundreds of pieces of legislation on matters big and small, from backing the city’s Olympics bid with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to authorizing new parking restrictions on one block of a residential street. The journal of proceedings for the council’s December 17 meeting, for instance, runs more than 2,000 pages; legislation that was simply introduced to council committees for later consideration ran another 16,000 pages.
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When he ran for election to the office in 2007, del Valle promised to modernize it and bring transparency to council business. In the two years since then, he and his staff have made some strides—all of the council journals since 1981 are now available and searchable on the Web as PDFs, along with committee meeting notices and agendas. But the office still generates more than a million pieces of paper each month, and there’s no way to track legislation by subject, to see the progress of a proposal through the legislative process, or to follow the legislative activities of a particular alderman. Del Valle hopes the office, which has an annual budget just under $10 million, will receive a grant from the city in the next few weeks to implement a new document management system.
Rowell: I think we were both really shocked at how antiquated things were—I mean, half the desks in the City Council division had typewriters last year.
Carranza: Right now, when documents are transferred to us from committees, we literally have boxes of paper on the council floor. We could post things immediately with a new system—real-time posting. We also want a more tailored system so that you could search the site by alderman, ordinance name, even the name of the street that’s involved. With this kind of a system we should also be able to reduce the amount of paper we use and our copy costs.
Carranza: Actually, most of the reactions have been, ‘Where have you been?’ Some chairmen of committees have said that other aldermen call them and ask, ‘Did this item pass?’
Carranza: We want to have everything up and running by next year’s budget. We hope by then people are already using it.
