Government Efficiency

Government Efficiency

TECHNOLOGY by Jean Gruss | Editor/Lee-Collier

The realization hit Charlie Green eight years ago, shortly after he signed up for Comcast's high-speed Internet service at home.

"Why in the Dickens," Green recalls asking himself, "do we have people working downtown?"

Green, Lee County's Clerk of Circuit Court, quickly realized that letting employees work from home could boost productivity and save taxpayers million of dollars in pricey downtown Fort Myers office space.

Green's realization was prescient, as the population and real estate boom of the last few years flooded the courts with a rising tide of deeds, lawsuits and traffic tickets. Green's quest for shifting the work to home-based employees helped him find better technology to speed up clerical work while keeping his overhead in check.

Meanwhile, just down the street in Fort Myers, Lee County Property Appraiser Ken Wilkinson faced a similar tsunami of real estate transactions that threatened to overwhelm his office. But shrewd investments in technology over the years helped Wilkinson stay on top of the deluge and avoid hiring dozens more employees.

Green and Wilkinson stand out in the way they push investment in technology to make their county offices more efficient, much like a business owner seeks to keep operating costs at a minimum. Granted, some of that drive comes from the fact that they have to face the voters every four years. But instead of hiring more people in bureaucratic knee-jerk fashion, they've found innovative ways to put technology to work.

Working from home

The math is compelling. At $18 per square foot for office space in downtown Fort Myers, Green says it's cheaper to lend employees a $2,000 computer and pay for their Internet access so they can work from home. Typically, office workers need about 150 to 250 square feet of office space, which translates to annual rent expense of $2,700 to $4,500 per employee.

Of course, many employees welcome the shift because they don't have to commute into crowded downtown Fort Myers, saving time, gas and parking fees. For the most part, they can choose the hours they work.

The Clerk's office has about 45 employees who work from home today. These are mostly clerical positions that require employees index thousands of documents, from traffic tickets to deeds. The Clerk's office lends each work-from-home employee a lightweight Dell personal computer and a separate 19-inch flat-panel monitor that costs about $2,000. The computer is pre-loaded with software that the employees need to access the court system. Green buys lightweight computers so that employees can carry them with one hand and bring them in to the office if they need repairs.

By the end of the year, Green expects as many as 150 of his 375 employees will work from home, or about 40% of the staff. Because it's so hard to find qualified people, he's also planning to shift more work to retirees looking for part-time work. He points to recent surveys of local retirees that show that they spend more time at home on the Internet than watching television.

But it's taken eight years for Green to master the effort and be certain that the office-to-home transition wouldn't disrupt daily courthouse operations. For starters, not everyone has had access to high-speed Internet. Doris Maitland, director of the clerk's information systems department, only gained access to a high-speed Internet connection from home in south Lee County last year.

Then, the technology only lately has been sophisticated enough for documents to show up well on computer screens. Scanners that copy paper documents have recently become more reliable, Green says.

The biggest challenge, Green and Maitland say, is that a glitch such as a malfunctioning firewall or a bad thunderstorm that knocks out Internet service can halt the work-from-home crew for hours or even days. In some cases, when the system is down for longer than a few hours, employees must drive downtown to work in the technology department's training rooms. "They're not happy about it," Green acknowledges, though he says the technology bugs have been worked out to the point where such an occurrence will be rare.

Green also had to decide who would be eligible to work from home. "If you're a slug at the office, you're not going home," he says.

In fact, he finds that the most productive employees in the office are often the best candidates to work from home because co-workers won't distract them with requests for help. He's found that on average, they're 20% more productive at home than at the office.

Green says he prefers to keep more social employees working downtown. There, they interact with the hundreds of customers that come to the courthouse each day.

To hold employees accountable, Green and his staff crafted a detailed contract of what's expected. For example, each recording employee who works from home is required to record at least125 documents or index 400 documents in each eight-hour period they work.

There are strict rules as to where and how they use their computers, too. For example, employees must work in a room that is free of noises, such as crying babies or barking dogs. What's more, employees can't use their computers to visit chat rooms, shopping networks, music streaming sites, gambling or porn sites.

While the contract allows for the clerk's office to visit workers at home, Green says he trusts his employees will adhere to the contract. "We ain't their mama; we're their employer," Green jokes with a forced drawl. Turning more serious, he says: "If you're in an organization and you don't trust people, you leave."

Picture this county

To a county property appraiser, the measure of success versus other jurisdictions is the agency's operating costs per parcel. The lower the cost per parcel, the better. At about $11.45 per parcel based on the latest data, Wilkinson's is among the lowest in the country.

Wilkinson says he's managed to keep costs low because technology has made employees more productive. For example, even though the number of real estate transactions has doubled in the last two years, Wilkinson has only added 18 people to his staff since he first won election to the office in 1980.

The Internet has been a big help. Wilkinson was among those who lobbied the state legislature to allow electronic access to public records. When the legislature allowed it in 1990, Wilkinson quickly built a Web site (www.leepa.org) that immediately slashed phone request for information by 70% and walk-in traffic by 30%.

Wilkinson says he's always looked for technology to give him an edge. For instance, in the early 1990s, Wilkinson persuaded the building departments of Lee County and five municipalities to hand over plans for any new construction so his office could digitize them into the county's mapping system.

Digitizing the new-construction plans cut down the time that Wilkinson's staff had to inspect the new buildings, as they are required to do by law so that they can be added to the tax rolls. Appraisers now could visit 24 properties per day, up from eight previously, because they could carry a digital record of the plans with them that sped up the verification process.

With technological success under his belt, Wilkinson welcomed any new idea that could keep his costs down. So in 2000, when an upstart technology company called Pictometry approached him, he jumped at the chance to be among the first to adopt the new technology.

Pictometry hires pilots to criss-cross a jurisdiction and photograph every parcel from up to 12 different angles. The mapping software lets you type in an address and find photos of the property in question.

Despite the fact that Pictometry was a young company, Wilkinson was eager to experiment with the software because of the promise that it would make his job easier.

Here's why: Wilkinson says that Pictometry has perfected the software to the point that he plans to ask the state legislature to change the property appraisal rules.

As the law currently reads, the property appraiser's staff must physically visit every real estate parcel within a three-year period. But with Pictometry, Wilkinson argues that lawmakers can change the wording that would allow his staff to visually inspect properties. That would save the appraiser's staff countless hours traveling on Lee's congested roads from one property to another, Wilkinson says.

Wilkinson, who was the architect of the 1992 Save our Homes amendment that limited increases in homestead property assessments, says a similar proposal to change the law to visual inspections failed at the last minute during last year's legislative session but he's confident it will pass this year.

Already, Wilkinson touts the success of Pictometry in helping assess the damage from Hurricane Charley in 2004. Pictometry planes took pictures of the county shortly after the hurricane skirted Lee County and Wilkinson's staff overlaid the photos over those taken prior to the hurricane.

Initially, Wilkinson provided the first damage assessments to the Federal Emergency Management Agency so that the county could quickly receive emergency funds.

Later, the before-and-after photos let Wilkinson's staff focus their reappraisal efforts for the tax rolls on properties that had suffered damage, saving invaluable time that would have been wasted by driving around looking for damaged properties.

"I could never have done that," Wilkinson says, "without technology."

THE CONTRACT

Lee County Clerk of Circuit Court Charlie Green requires employees who work from home to sign a contract. Here are some expectations:

Schedule: The Clerk's workweek begins on Saturday and ends on Friday and a 40-hour workweek must be completed within that time frame.

Duration: A work-from-home employee can return to the office any time but the Clerk's office can terminate the contract with one day's notice.

Quotas: A work-from-home employee must record at least 125 documents, index at least 400 documents or verify at least 450 documents in each eight-hour workday.

Evaluation: The home arrangement with each employee will be reviewed every 30 days for the first three months, then once a year as part of the employee's annual evaluation.

Residence: The Clerk's office has the right to enter an employee's home and conduct a safety review of the work area with one day's notice. The employee's work area should be in an area of the house free of noises such as barking dogs or baby cries.

System problems: An employee must immediately notify a supervisor when a technology problem arises and agree to report to the office if a supervisor requests it.

Equipment: The Clerk's office lends the employee a computer and software, but it must be returned if the contract ends.

Insurance: The Clerk's office covers all loaned equipment and any personal injury that may occur while the employee is working at home.

Unauthorized Internet sites: Employees must not use the Clerk's office computers to visit chat rooms, shopping networks, music-streaming sites, gambling sites, pornographic sites and sites that promote business or personal gain.