City of Napa Legistar Optimization Training - December 9, 2024
STREAMING COPY IN PREPARATION — RECORDING AVAILABLE FROM THE ORIGINAL SOURCE
City of Napa Legistar Optimization Training - December 9, 2024
The City of Napa staff held a training session on December 9, 2024, to optimize the Legistar agenda management system. The session covered three primary pain points: housing authority items generating into city council meetings, excessive agenda editing after generation, and potential design changes to the agenda report. Attendees included Tiffany, Sam, Natalia, and Carolyn, with Carolyn leading the training. The meeting was originally scheduled for 90 minutes and ran over, but no additional cost was incurred.
Discussion Items
- Agenda Generation & Workflow Controls: Carolyn demonstrated how to create a new meeting, set date/time, and use statuses (Draft, Closed, Final, Final Revised). She enabled a new 'Hidden' status for scheduling future meetings without public visibility. The team discussed closing agendas the Wednesday before a meeting, then moving to Thursday morning to accommodate late items.
- Housing Authority Item Separation: A test showed that housing authority items still appear in city council agendas. Carolyn implemented a temporary fix by filtering consent and administrative report sections to only city council-controlled items. She plans to create a separate workflow for the Housing Authority and Public Financing Authority to permanently resolve the issue.
- Page Breaks & Section Formatting: Carolyn showed how to insert manual page breaks using 'page break' header comments, and how 'keep section together' toggle affects layout. They agreed to revisit the two-page boilerplate notice of meeting procedures to condense it, and possibly link to it online if legally permissible.
- Accessible HTML Agenda & Translation: Carolyn recommended enabling an HTML (accessible) agenda with a Google Translate widget, which improves screen reader compatibility and multi-language support. She also suggested enabling an 'Upcoming Meetings' section on the public portal for easier navigation.
- File Cleanup: Many old items (from 2017, 2020) were still open in the system. Carolyn offered to bulk-assign final action dates to close them out, which would clean up the agenda creation list. She also showed the 'add many lines' feature and color-coded file availability.
- Agenda Report Design: The team liked the current left-aligned Arial font style. They noted a spelling error on the cover page (Councilmember Beth Painter's name misspelled as 'Paintner'), which Carolyn fixed. They also decided to suppress the 'Printed on' date from the PDF to avoid public confusion.
Key Outcomes
- Spelling Fix: Carolyn corrected the misspelling of 'Paintner' to 'Painter' and will update the member titles after the December 17th meeting when a new vice mayor is elected.
- Boilerplate Text: Carolyn will add the public participation instructions (from the December 3 agenda) into the workflow control so it automatically appears in all agendas.
- Hidden Status: Enabled to allow advance scheduling without public visibility.
- Housing Authority Workflow: A separate workflow will be created to stop items from bleeding into city council agendas.
- Accessible HTML: To be enabled in the near future.
- Upcoming Meetings Section: To be enabled for the public portal.
- Printed On Date: To be removed from the PDF agenda design.
- File Cleanup: Carolyn will close out old items (2017–2020) in the background.
- Next Meeting: The group will reconvene on December 10 (Monday) for a 90-minute session to cover files and minutes modules.
Meeting Transcript
Scheduling. We didn't nobody needed to rewatch that on video. So you're gonna get a little pop-up asking if it's okay to record this. If you could just go ahead and say yes to that, that'd be great. And I will share my screen. My good friends here. And welcome everybody to the first of your series of Legistar optimization calls. I'm very excited to be here with you. And today we wanted to start with taking a look at uh the agendas module in Legistar and looking at some of the challenges that we're having there and and just kind of taking a full look at um quite a bit of things in there just to make sure that we've got all of the features and functions turned on that we need um to uh to make sure that you're getting everything that you can out of Legistar. And then I had identified three specific pain points, which is that housing authority items are generating into the city council meetings, and so we need to separate those. Um you're having to do a lot of agenda editing after generation beyond removing the housing authority items, and that uh we may be looking at some design changes to how the agenda report uh looks. Those are the three primary points of pain. I uh yeah, I would yeah, how you said when you run the agenda, how it looks, yes. Yeah, how the PDF report looks. Yep, yep, yep. Like keeping sections together and that kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely page breaks and all that good stuff. Yes. So I want to start with though, if I may, just kind of reviewing some of the things in here to make sure that we know about all of them. We're using all of them and we're comfortable with all of them. And then I'm gonna open up um the admin area and we're gonna look at that housing authority issue. Does that sound good to start? I know um and and Sam and Natalia, you're a bit newer to Legistar. So if there is anything that you want me to talk about in more detail, just yell Tiffany. I know that you probably know some of this will be quite a bit of old hat for you. Yeah, I'm Rusty. Since this is your production environment, I would prefer not to create a meeting in here unless you tell me you would like me to. Um, I was just going to show you around using one of yours, but what's your preference? If you wanted to play, we haven't done anything like the December 17th meeting is like we'll be publishing that next week, but we haven't even like we could play with that one very easily because it actually has a decent amount of files attached to it too. Oh, there's no we'll do that then. Yeah, I don't think we have housing stuff for I mean, I don't think we have any future housing items in. I could always create it. I mean, if we wanted to, if we need to. No, I I know what the problem is. Okay, but yeah, so other than that, yeah, we could definitely play what we're gonna do. So we can use the 17 one, and then if you have to regenerate it later, that's fine. Um, does everybody know how to create and to schedule a meeting? I don't need to do that part. We can skip it. Sure. Everybody comfortable with that. I actually know. I mean, if yeah, if yeah, I think we definitely do it. So Natalia can see how to do it. Because that I can that I can just delete. When you want to schedule, you could do we're through, we have through March. We could you could do it. Do you want me to schedule one for April? You could do April 1st. Okay.
openpublica.com