okay okay so we're recording we're good kind of to add to my email um you're gonna send me or

you're gonna you weren't gonna send me you're going to find out if it's possible for me to get

member the people thing in a csv instead of just adobe yes um i have not gotten an answer to that

yet because the person who knows the answer to that question has been on vacation so allowed to

vacation so that is fine but thank you for the reminder i do believe they're back today so i

will follow up with them and we'll be able to get an answer to that this week i just went i went

chasing that down and kind of got that thing of like oh you know who knows that is so and so and

then that person was like i don't know you should ask kyle i don't know kyle's like i don't know ask

ally and i'm like i feel like i'm playing a game of telephone no i totally get that so i feel like

no one's ever tried so they're just kind of sending me on to the next person ask bob bob knows

everything well finally but somebody was like just ask john yeah the product manager but he's been out

so so you know john yes john jay so i just try not to bug him yeah no that i get totally get that um i'm

kind of a i try to like put all my thoughts into one thing and send it not kill someone with ad

messages um and we may have covered this next question or maybe it's something we're covering in the

future so you can tell me to you know file this away i think a couple things so we have if you look

at our departments we have 311 of them yes that's quite a bit so i finally was able to unravel a bit

of how we got to 311 and more importantly i was able to talk to the people who kind of made that happen

and reverse that boat a little bit so if you look at our departments you'll see i just happen to have

it open and is it why so we call it yipsy youth something something something something creative

economy i don't know it's youth it's kiddos and in yipsy oh it's youth parks and community environments i

don't know but they have like 10 departments because what happened at one time was they put

like yipsy development services yipsy park services yipsy permitting events and it's followed by this

number well yes what is that number okay so i do know what the number is it's called a depth a department

id depth id is what we call it but here's what was happening every year and this this happened after i

stopped doing the the agenda and so now that i'm back and doing the agenda every year our budget

department asks us the clerk's office for a report that shows every single staff report not the title

anything but they want us to be able to run a report by department so they can say this department

did 12 and this department did 15 and this department did 17 reports and then they do some sort of weird

math that has nothing really to do with anybody that then they charge they justify the clerk's existence

basically because we're a general fund by saying the department of utilities you pay for this much

of the clerk's office and department of oh so they figure out who to bill right so here's where my

problem is that's so many like are those numbers even correct anymore no there you go so these numbers

change every year no that's a night so that is so my quite i have like has somebody been coming in

every year and updating the department problem and that's what i told them we're giving you a bad

report so yeah we're giving you bad data that's not helpful so then we got into the details of it

and essentially because every single department with the exception of the utilities department

and like these two little things are general fund what they call general fund departments

they're not enterprise fund departments so what they are going to do is they're going we're going

to get rid of all of this that's where i need to talk to you about and we'll go back i think that

sounds like a good idea that sounds like a good starting position our 20 departments or whatever we

have we don't even have 20 but let's just call it 20 because i can do that kind of math we're going

to go with our 20 departments and then our two departments that have this really special fund

that our consultants do this magic with we're going to add them but that will bring us like 20

departments 22 departments and not and like only two that you have to do the the account number thing

on yes and they're not even gonna put the number on there they okay they it's going to be like it's

gonna be utility so it'll be like dou dash yeah let me share my screen and show you what i'm looking at

you dash the super cool fund it's not going to be all these numbers that keep changing so it'll be

just like utilities general fund utilities you know yeah so infrastructure or whatever right so

it'd be like utilities might have more than one entrance or okay but no one else really should

but no one else really should so when i get that list from whoever i told you it's getting from budget

and i would expect that in like the next two weeks can i give that to you to fix or do i need to go in and

i can do it for you um so my question for you will be is do you want to

i'm gonna retire and replace right that was going to be my question total remove and replace so that

when you run reports going forward you're not getting any old weird nonsense yeah so we're just

really going to have you know city attorney city auditor city city manager treasurer community

development it's going to be one of each and then like our 20 and i don't even know if it's 20 i'm

just pulling i'd have to look yeah let's say there's 20 departments they do um and i think here is where

another question comes up so in that like you go all i think it's all the way to the top hold on let me

just look real quick the list is all identical it's not oh i thought there was one in here maybe there

isn't um no they took we took those out last time i think okay i think we're okay with that last

question i had okay so yes it's going to be a total remove and replace yes so what we're going to do is

we're going to deactivate all of the old ones we're not going to remove them because if god forbid

somebody comes and asks you about something from five years ago i would people like you to be

people won't see them anymore when they go to create because where these are getting assigned as

you know and this is probably what's causing the map part of the problem is because if i'm a drafter

am i reading all the way through to the number and picking the correct thing of course i'm not

no and no one's also calling me and telling me the number is wrong

and so that's also not helpful right so you have all that nonsense now here so if they're just

going through this and they're seeing city treasurer okay community development they know

that they don't have to read all the way past for the rest of this and so the only time you'll see

the full list of anything that was ever used um is if you're doing a search so that you can find

old ones okay so now i have another question i yes and then i have a follow-up question for you

you on this you that you're in right now those top i'm sorry like five the ones with there are

departments yeah those are actually community bodies that meet their bodies that meet so they

shouldn't be in this list i don't think they should be because all of those depart all of those

commissions are supported by a department right so that is happening and you asked me the question i was

about to ask you which was um it looks like we also have a bunch of things that are marked as a

requester okay that should not be only your departments should be marked as a requester so

what we're going to want to do is that looks like it's your mostly in their commissions if i go and look

at your commissions here 27 any one of them that has this box checked shouldn't have this box checked

okay so i don't know how many of them it is it's probably it's yeah okay not it's not every single

one of them and here's what happens and nothing about what i'm about to say is gonna shock you

when people create a new thing they think that they need to check all of the boxes yes

and so they do that and then they get confused about what like because they instead of asking what

a box is they go well it's a box i should check it right so and it isn't all of them so some of them

were created correctly and some were not okay i am noticing a second thing in here though with some

of these and we'll go back and because i'm just going to fix these real quick because it's not going

to take very long because there's like 20 of them it's fine some of them also don't have the show on

web box checked so they are not showing on the on the public facing portal there in some instances it

could be that they don't exist anymore okay um like there's there should be in there oh gosh the

name is something like animal care citizens advisory board and then there's another one

it's animal well-being something something and one replaced the other correct copy that

but that is a box i'm going to check in the future i'm going to say

that you like that can be requesters not going to be checked but show on the web is going to be correct

correct okay so um you can double check this list of 27 anytime you want for um to make sure that

like which one is which of should be showing and shouldn't be showing okay um just for a quick

um if if body meets just to orient you to all of these if you're just gonna look at them anyway you

can ignore the departments i'm gonna handle those but looking at your standing committees and your

boards body meets means that you can schedule a meeting for them and make an agenda okay active means

they will show up in the um in the drop down box um for both creating meetings and for searching

can be request or make them show up in this department list auto expert export is an old function

that you were probably using when you originally set up legistar but are is not used any longer it will not

hurt anything to leave it checked um so you do not need to clean that out if you don't want to but when

you create a new one you do not need to check it okay it's it goes to the old meeting manager which is

like the the live meeting tool that predates the streaming right um so like you know it's just not

really around anymore show on web is does it show on the portal or not okay number of members has to have

something in there it doesn't really matter what that number is wendy if you like to keep track of

how many members a body should have you can certainly do it in there if you don't care you can just put

zero you just have to put something something and then sort order if you do a sort order of 999 it

alphabetizes the list for you oh gotcha okay that's my secret secret trick that i teach everyone

okay and then i'll i'll show you around the rest of this another okay when we come back to this next

week okay so those were those were my since my email pressing question yes oh i'm so happy we're

going to get to clean up that department list for you because that's right a mess yeah agreed there is

something else that i noticed about the um department drop down menu okay which is that there are some

individuals that show up on there as well is that because the requester box is checked for them in

their people record okay i can go in and fix that and i discovered something interesting um the other

day with a new customer that i'm working with that i didn't oh no it's not that's not with requester

that's with approver never mind the can be a requester box i think is unchecked by default when you

create a new person but there's this really annoying thing in legistar where on the approval

tracking tab yes the word requester with any is used to denote who is responsible for the approval

tracking sequence gotcha so i think a lot of people check request store thinking that that has to do with

approvals and it doesn't it will make their name show up in this list those people are more sophisticated

than me because i would not have thought yeah i never would notice that i i just think it's you

know and also again i think it's a you know see a box check a box like that must be a box i need to

check so that it can work and so it's you know it's just not really well explained and the only reason

that that box exists at all is that there are some people out there um i usually see you know you know

how you know usually an item is is brought forward by a department every now and again there is someone who

doesn't want to be listed by their department they want to be listed by their name so you can make

the individual the request or instead of the department that they're the head of i usually

see it with like city and county attorneys there's sometimes like a statutory requirement that it not be

the title and it be their actual you know okay it actually be like edward smith county attorney for

you know whatever gotcha all right so that's why the option exists but generally you don't don't need

it okay i do think if i had to guess though i think you have uh city clerk as a person

something there's something that is like sack city clerk or something like that

yeah because city clerk is coming up without a number

so there should be city clerk the department but we refer to that as the office of the see those

all need to be changed anyway because we're going to these are all incorrect anyway yeah so yeah yeah

in your free time you can go through the people list and and unmark them as a requester okay um or you

know um i can do it too because it's literally gonna unless you have anyone who actually wants to be

listed by their name no we do not we could just divide the list in half i could start at the bottom and

you could start at the top and we could just uncheck it for everyone because there's 535 people in here

so it's going to take a while yeah we'll also add that on the list of stuff to be done but yeah we

don't have yeah i mean it's not it's not like it's causing anything to be broken right but like it's

it's it's another inefficiency that we can you know help get rid of for you because the key thing is

is to limit the amount of not you know nonsense scrolling anybody's got to do in here to find what

they're looking for yes if this list becomes 2025 options long instead of you know 300 agreed that's

infinitely easier for everyone agreed much less painful all right okay that was my newest yeah

newest and latest and greatest yeah all right let's look at your

to do list we are they they still haven't updated done our second update on the report to remove the

number okay i'll follow up on that thank you for flagging that for me thank you that has been submitted

but awesome you know i do it's possible that they just glanced right past it and been like didn't we

already do that and didn't ask you know remove item number okay because yeah that's going to like

really reduce um controlling body currently when you generate the two and five pm city council agenda

it also displays the committee um meeting items despite the correct body being selected and this

only happens on tuesdays so we have a couple council meetings and we have council standing committees

and you this problem is only occurring when the standing committees meet on the same day as council

which happens every yeah which happens every tuesday right yes um there are a couple of ways to fix this

um the legis are special and um i mean the primary legislative body in legisart is special and it is the

only body type that can display items in control of another meeting body type if if it never

happens if it never needs to be an issue like if it never is a concern then um i can just come

through every is and let me ask you a follow-up question is it only on specific item types that

you're seeing the problem or is it across the whole area because their standing committees order of

operations is really similar yes

yes i think we can solve this pretty quickly

so they do consent discussion information

okay

so you're seeing it i'm guessing in consent discussion and information item

yes not they don't have public hearings or really special presentations so oh that's i remember

why i have to do this with sequel code because you have two primary legislative bodies you have the two and the five

okay right but not remind me we i think there's a one three there's a we don't need the three we don't use the three o'clock anymore correct

did you ever

i don't remember it but and i've been here 15 16 years but

i just don't want to take it off the web if

if no if we were gonna have a three o'clock it would be a special it would be something stupid

and you would just update the two o'clock one to three yes i would that's exactly what i would do

okay let me do this real quick we're just gonna do this live so that you can see how i live my life

i'm not trying to create it new

i'm just updating the names of both of them really quickly

awesome and then changing them right back so that i can go down to the security log and grab

their id numbers i wish i knew a better way to do this but i have never

we get that sometimes things are things

facts okay um go back to my notes for you uh and sequel

what is body id 138 and 435 okay i mean do you want to watch me write code for a second so that

we know that this just gets done yeah that's awesome if you don't mind i'll just do it it will not take

me very long this is very easy code plus you can be like i now know something really cool

don't ever try to write this yourself you'll cry i would not i you don't even you did not even need

to say that because i think i want to watch it but i'm never doing it all right um do the standing

committees ever do public hearings or ceremonial no okay so it's just consent discussion and information

where we have the issue okay

okay we need

and you use meeting dates right

um i'm not sure you assign agenda dates to your items yes we do okay

and

i copy and paste these from my cheat sheets

yeah

or

what's nice is that you already have your agenda broken up by item type so i don't have to do fancy item type stuff that's going to make me cry

do you have an agenda that we can generate really quickly just for me to test and make sure that this is

working i could even just regenerate what like last week's uh

no i was gonna i'm waiting for it to get to i think 22 can be done hold on one second

yeah july 22 try that one

five doesn't matter uh no the two i'm sorry yeah the two

sure is thinking

yeah it's been good things a lot okay um it seems like a lot is this about the right size

no it should be big yeah okay

um okay so

where what can i um

what's a good thing for me

because like in this view i have to pick one to look at to see if we're getting something that shouldn't be there

so interestingly enough i generated it here and everything is on here twice on my view of that

did you refresh your administration let me oh wait a minute

yup this is all the same items over again isn't it

um no yours looks good

no allocate sacramento heritage incorporated non-profit corporate remaining no it is it's

repeating because oh you know what on my version it doesn't have any of the little it doesn't have

the headers okay that's weird let me let's do let me do this

let me uh i know what i did i i i need to put the it's redundant and drives me crazy but i need to put the uh file type in there as well

okay

i don't know why

i have to do that

um

i'm going to go ahead and assume that you've always had

um

oh no

hold that thought

well we don't have very many item types to choose from so that's nice

okay

okay

goes consent

discussion

informational

so while i'm talking through all of this um

start um have you been thinking about um minutes as well

yes

yes

and so

we actually have a meeting tomorrow we have a couple and so all my members are in

we plan on doing um trying to record the vote stuff like that

what i in a previous um an old meeting that's already happened i tried to mess around with a

a little bit and i'm just uh i think there's probably some action words that we use that are not in that

not in here yeah and i'm not sure how what the formatting look like so

okay um i mean yeah it you know

and you said that meeting is later this week we have two meetings tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow being

tuesday yeah

um so you know we can certainly look at stuff today and and you can start trying to think about it but

you know you're probably gonna have to have that meeting

uh to be sure

uh what what you want to do here but that's fine

okay discussion

i have to make legistar's poor little brain

well that's okay no stuff but my brain is fried enough these days that if i don't do this right

now wendy i'm gonna forget about it until thursday and then i'm gonna be like did it to do what am i doing

yeah i know did you already delete this while i was fapping around uh let me see

uh because i just got i got a little pop-up but okay this should have fixed it but we're just gonna

double check the good news is is that none of these look like committee items so you know the first part

of my that was yes that way because there is committee items

are there committee items for for the 22nd so you know we should be able to actually confirm if we

do that that looks more correct okay okay hold on i can't refresh on my slide yeah we have a pnpe meeting

that morning so excuse me

this looks like more of a proper proper list and we're not getting the duplications anymore either right

because let me look at that pnpe meeting right now hold on a second well that would be my question is do

they have items already created for themselves and i can search that really quickly yes there are

uh it's not numbered right but there's nine items and that are already in the pmpe queue

for that day and i yeah there's 39 items in total scheduled for the 22nd across the 2 pm and ppe

uh there's 39 on the two o'clock and if we don't see them on the two o'clock then we did it

well you did but um yeah but you helped i do not see them you were incredibly encouraging

that is amazing the team is going to lose their marbles okay you know it's the little things it

is and that's really the truth that's really the truth it is that is really what we're learning right

it's just like it's amazing what something that you know i mean a grand total takes me maybe 15 or

20 minutes like once i understand the problem it's understanding the problem is hard

it is and i think that there's some some work but you know yeah and there was some modicum of

somebody like oh it's not that big of a deal all but it is it is that big of a deal i don't want to

do that anymore okay i always say it turns into real time eventually it does right because what

they're saying to you is oh wendy it only takes me five minutes to get rid of everything you're like

but yeah it takes you five minutes on every meeting times however many meetings a year times however

many standing committee it's not you know it's real time read so if you're having to justify your

budget you know we gotta we gotta find you some time okay so that is that and then the other thing

did the last thing on my email make sense um this is what i would like not quite so you know um this

was the main one so uh the the agenda review report or the well it's not called that because you showed

me something like that and it had some of the information but when i'm in this view that you're in

right now if you go up to reports do you see one that's called min uh what is it called agenda four

uh-huh and then i just probably oh i um here let me show you probably showed the file id i had file id

agenda status okay then um on the show i have keep sections together and then over yeah over there i have

yes what you have those three and then you run it and nothing else that's it

yeah this this report has not been designed for you ever so it is some generic out of the box report

from 20 well i don't i don't know how generic it is because it has some information on there that we

would have had to tell you okay it's really and the report is like it's close it's so close

is it like somebody got 50 of the way through through this thought and i'm gonna go 80 i mean

so close i love that once it opens you'll see immediately because there's some sort of

header something i don't even know because you know if you run it in word it shows up one way if

you run it adobe it shows another way but it covers everything and it's on every single

i don't know what it is but yeah if you go ahead and click on that adobe it'll you'll yeah for some

reason it just decided to print that on oh my god somebody did it like that's not what it looks like

for me what no okay let me write it when i run it and then sure that preliminary draft thing is okay

that is i swear to god that is not what it looked like for me hold on that is so weird

because that i could live with is this closer to what you that's what i i mean i don't want the

footer on there because we repaged number and i don't want to change that but when i run it hold

on it's thinking right yeah yeah yeah yeah and then you can share your screen on share

puts it right that that stuff at the top that preliminary agenda stuff at the top it's over

the top of the document like well that's dumb did you do it to word or to adobe i tried everything

well now i'm confused i am i do let me see hold on it's thinking yeah just share your screen when it's

ready okay here oh that is not okay go to the do you have the email i sent you yes yes i should i

see what you got like the 9 a.m showing me i swear to god i am now looking at what you have oh oh i see

what happened i see what happened i see what happened okay please i think look so let's look at the

difference between what you sent me and it's the status literally the fact that it's in closed status

is making the header dip over oh good the line well the only thing that's different about mine

is that mine is in draft in draft you're entirely right that's that's that's the whole thing that's

how do i fix that um well what status are you going to run it in most of the time needed to say the

status i don't oh just uncheck the box that says status when you run the report well i i need okay so

maybe that's my interest oh just uncheck the agenda status help me out here agenda status is not the

file because what i wanted to show and if you go back to the report it's showing you

i wanted to show current show the file status yeah so if i unclick agenda stat i'm so so i feel like this

got this is close somebody did get like you said 80 of the way through designing this and didn't finish the

thought it's just it's taking forever to run do you know how many hours a week they spend doing this

too many because what they do is they run the agenda uh-huh and then they while it's open they look

at the screen that shows what the current my heart is so sad report oh my god

okay so what we need is for the item status it is to be no it's somewhere here no no all i want is

current approver see at the bottom oh the current approver that's all i need because because if there

is no current approver then you know it's ready except something said go back up to the top does it

say oh it says items and draft are not included can we change that items items and draft status are not

included on the prelim i so that makes me wonder hold please is this a custom report i don't know oh i can

find that out um it's an agenda not minutes carolyn you're it is it is custom so we did customize this

report for you though the the red text is coming from like somebody from grant we granite has put

that in for you okay um so but what i am also wondering and this is something that we can just

go back and look at the agenda and see um it says items and draft are not included on the prelim but

oh i see what you're getting at okay so that is not factually accurate this item approval of city

council meeting minutes 20 25 is it's right here so this text is not correct i wonder if i

yeah and okay here let me let me give them that so here is what my question for them would be

do they want all items that are planned for the agenda regardless of status to show up on here

yes so we this red text is stupid and incorrect yes ma'am so this approval of the city council

minutes even though it's in draft should be on this prelim agenda so the words in red are are not

not in okay they're bubkis perfect so i want to see if we has it ever happened that you have run the

prelim agenda with an item on it that is in a ready status that has completed approval reviews

yes because if you run this report on last month's last week's meeting because everything's there

everything's there i and it ran correctly i didn't i didn't have any in draft though for that meeting

it ran correctly except for the header was screwed up so my question for you is you don't have any way

in scrolling through this to differentiate between something that's still in draft and something that

is in agenda ready correct so i so that would be what we so it would be valuable if my team could put in

the current file status in addition to the name of the current approver yes because you it would be

good if you could differentiate between it's just straight up in draft yes versus it is ready yeah and

i mean we're looking at a bad example because i'm imagining your draft item of the city council minutes

probably don't go through approval reviews they you know that or no or it just goes through you

because mindy puts them in and i approve them and we just yeah and you just move on with your day

yeah uh so that would be helpful and we don't need this footer anymore correct we'd prefer not to

because what happens is we run all the meetings for this week on tuesday and all of next tuesday's meeting

and put it in one package and we uh talk about it we go to a meeting we talk about it

yeah so we want to remove red text about draft items yes we want to remove page footer

uh language um you might as well because they're gonna put a that way nothing's on top of each other

so just remove the whole thing yeah do you still want page two no we don't want any page numbers at all

all remove page footer language and page number okay and then add if possible

this is my question for my designers if this is possible add if possible agenda file id status

file status fields uh ideally located where right underneath the file number or underneath the or

with um if you can have both of them at the bottom like it'll be it'll be status and then if there's

an approver that would be the next line yes like that one like see the one that kind of at the top

of the page where it says robin nagochi yeah if it could be above this yeah that would be perfect

it could be like current status approval review current approver robin nagochi current file status

agenda ready current approver no one right like it's not listing it for this one for example

because there isn't one so like um ideally we'd put it above the current approver

but if that's not possible if it's there that would be i don't i am thinking they might come

back and say to me it's got to go underneath the file id or something like that so we don't care like

just somewhere but ideally down with the approver because that is a nice and if they both need to move

up that we don't care yeah you just need the information because essentially what you're

i mean literally what you were trying to do is print this screen yes ma'am and and i have done that but

the this is the time that the city manager and her team also review their recommendations

right so they want to look at the text as well yep yep yep perfect um and then so something that

i'm noticing too so we just don't have to have the status on there at all but

your meeting status language for closed is just also really long yeah we don't need it on there do you

you use the status though well so interesting question you're like what does that status do

again what is the difference between final and meeting closed status and an amazing question

meeting close so yes i don't know why we wrote it out so formal for you we usually just call it closed

okay putting an agenda into a status of closed kind of allows you to live in between draft and final

okay so because when you put an agenda into final legislator starts the process of releasing

the information about the meeting to insight when you when so let me just kind of take you through the

life cycle when an agenda is in draft on the insight portal the only things the public can see

are that the meeting is scheduled so they can see the name of the meeting like

city council to p you know city council july 22nd 2 p.m and you know that it wherever your location

is and that's all they can see it's literally like looking at a calendar hold okay when you put it

into final but insight starts populating the meeting details hyperlink um that allows members of the

public to look at just a list of the items that are going to be on that agenda without all of the

refer of the you know headers in the boilerplate language and everything like that and usually that's

done about two minutes before you hit the publish button right so you know they kind of go together

right closed allows you to live in between where you're saying i'm not taking any new items for this

agenda but i'm not ready to publish it yet okay so what close does is if you put an agenda into

closed status and somebody goes into the files module and tries to schedule a new item for that meeting

they will get a pop-up message that says you can't do that and can i customize that pop-up message

no because right now what it does is it tells them to schedule it on a future date

and then i have to figure that shit out and move it around that's i just don't want them to do that i

just want them to call me so i can put it on the right agenda for them yeah because i think what

it says is like speak to either choose another date or speak to your administrator say that

um i can ask i can't let me put it this way to you i cannot customize that uh i don't know that the

error messages in legistar can be customized because they i mean it's technically an error message so

right i imagine the reason that they did it is that you know they wanted to tickle the user's brain of

like did you select this date by accident please go back and try again it's not because i'll give you an

example because but what they're doing is just going i don't want to bother wendy so i'm just

going to pick december and so like going back to the 7 july 22nd we have a meeting at five o'clock

that's closed because it's a special thing we only do this we do this high school thing once a summer

the two o'clock's open because we that our cutoff date hasn't that's your regular meeting and people

are all like i want to be on the five o'clock and so what they do is they think i closed it for some

dumb reason they put it on whatever the hell date they want to and then they call me and i'm like okay

well there's no five o'clock for a reason put it on too oh well and i just i didn't know yes so my

question for you is um is when remind me because you know it's been a minute

the agenda when they are creating a new item you do have the agenda date required right they can't

bypass that and come back to it later correct because and we change because otherwise you end up with

meeting items that are just lost yeah because and that was actually changed quite a while ago

because people would be like oh i entered this and i don't really remember or i didn't put a title

in but i already gave someone that number i'm like yeah you guys what's the number well we don't

really remember that so no no so you have to pick a date and i'd like to stick with that even if i

have i mean yes keep moving things yes um so so what they're trying to do is get around

like they're they're using the prompt from the error message to get around yes the actual control

because they don't like that you put a control you do not in there they don't care for it um

i think that's certainly something that's worth me raising with john's team to just say like you know

hey we're getting some feedback that the please select another date is kind of introducing the user to a

a workaround to a deadline um can we consider reframing um i mean reframing that say you were

a slug and didn't do your work on time no but i think if it prioritized please speak to an administrator

that's what it it said you know that's the second part of the message um and because i mean i think the

reason that it's in there is you know if you were trying to schedule it for the july 22nd

2 p.m meeting and you accidentally clicked the 5 p.m meeting you know it is nice to have something

other than just you gotta go talk to wendy like a little bit of a prompt from the system that says

hey go back and check your agenda date so i'm wondering if if if i could talk them into rewriting

the language to say please verify your agenda date or speak to an administrator for help yeah

because if they just picked the 22nd one when they what they meant to pick was the 29th because you

know they just had a brain fart they it's it's fun like just click out of it and pick another day and

you're still going to have people who are going to know that they can do that and they're going to

get around it yes but like we don't need to help them get around it and i think like please verify

your agenda date is kind of better i need to anyway because you don't need to plant an idea

it's definitely a training component too so yeah there's a training aspect to it as well of like

they don't understand what that message is trying to tell them because they don't want to understand

that there's a deadline like some of it is really just kind of beating it into their brains of like

you understand i have deadlines and i am using a tool within our software to help me enforce those

deadlines you cannot continue to ignore them right yeah so i'll add that to the list of questions so

yeah oh my gosh if we can make this report work i would be so happy yeah i mean it literally

literally literally they usually run the report sometime on monday and then they do that side-by-side

comparison to put in the current approver and we send the staff at nine on wednesday so if my team could

come in because the meeting is on wednesday afternoon if my team could come in on wednesday

morning at eight and run these reports boom boom boom and send them out then

you've just saved a ton a ton a ton of work yes amazing all right well i'll take that to them

and thank you for clarifying i i was pretty sure i understood what the last question was but i was

like i'm just gonna ask her when i talk to her on the phone okay because that's what we're here for

oh that's amazing all right well i think we just just um made some big oh big moves all of the big moves

um for you so um that's awesome would you like me to delete this since this is so far away yeah go

ahead that's fine you know okay it would really help if i clicked the right keys

the three hamsters that run my brain would really have liked a longer weekend i understand that for sure

okay so would you like to use a little bit of the time that we have left to look at minutes or do you

want to have your meeting first would you yeah i think if we look at it you might be able to go in

with yeah let's do it ammo um what is a good meeting that we can look at because you're not doing your

minutes in here at all right now right we are not so if you want to use an old meeting or you want

yeah do you want to just use last week yeah like last the 2 p.m from the 10th yeah okay

oh that wasn't a very that's actually good this wasn't a very big meeting oh well no let's use a

slightly bigger meeting was there maybe more items on the five i don't remember now to be honest yeah

there's more i just wanted something that had each section okay so little bit of a tour of

legistar minutes remind me does sacramento do y'all use you are going to be using live meeting tools or

no yes so what my goal is and when we had one i don't remember which call but we had been on a call

my goal is kind of it's probably going to be a hybrid meaning they're going to do as much as they

can during the meeting and catch up after and catch up after perfect i think my guess probably about 85

percent will be able to be done at the meeting because the clerk herself is not having to do that

we have the people yeah we well the clerk goes to the meeting and then we have one person who's in

the charge of speaker slips and one person who does all the tagging the media manager business

yes that's i'm sorry the live manager business and that person will be doing the recording yes

because it's just adding a couple of more things for them to click in the tool that they're already in

and they're already used to that's perfect so what your first step to using the minutes

module and legistar will be once you integrate the the live meeting portion is going to be conducting

what we call an import of that data back from media manager i'm going to run that process right now

there's probably not really going to be any information in here um but you know just so that

you can see where the buttons are and you do that by clicking uh on the calendar tab onto the meeting that

you want to work on and then on onto the minutes tab okay you'll see that legistar has already made

the framework for you and this is just a it's a xerox copy of the agenda wendy that's all it is is

whatever was on the agenda on the 10th is is here now so you're just going to go tools import data

it's going to say importing from media manager will overwrite all minutes data for the meeting are

you sure you want to import that is basically just telling you hey don't do any work in legistar first

because you will lose it all so that's a very important training component is to train them that

importing is absolutely step one okay it is going to connect to your media manager site and it's going

to get that archive there isn't one for the 10th but that's fine uh normally what you would see is it

would that green line would grow for a couple of minutes the longer the meeting the longer it'll take

but it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to to run the the integration and when you complete

it it's going to update itself it's going to refresh the screen and you'll see new information in here

you will see a four or five digit code in the media box here that is the video recording or audio

recording clip id so it's letting you know that it has synced the video and then you will see any item

or line where an action was recorded that action will be in this column the one we did at the

meeting yes the action text so that'll be the motion text will pre-build in this box if you took any

notes in the live manager notes function they'll be showing here and then the last column is another

media column and you'll see um anywhere that a time stamp was done so almost every single line

uh will have uh its own id number and that is for those clips got it but there's always action that

has to be done back in legistar it's just really a question of how much the first thing that you're

going to want to do is mark all of your consent items so you're probably going to mark everything

that's under consent unless something got removed do they ever remove things from consent it doesn't happen

often but yes it does happen when they move them from consent do they move them to another part of

the agenda or do they just vote on them individually and leave them so if something gets removed they

will take two let's say one item gets removed so they will vote on the chunk and then they will vote

on the singular item that was removed but you don't move it to another part of the minutes you just leave

it no they just do it right then yeah okay so in legistar you can mark your consent items by

highlighting the first consent item holding your shift key and clicking the last consent item got

it and clicking mark consent okay and it is going to turn the numbers on the lines red so that's your

little visual cue of what you marked consent and then if they pulled anything off like i don't know this

change order you can just unmark that one by itself okay so that's the first thing that you want to do is

make sure everything gets marked as consent okay then over on your actions tab you're going to see

an even smaller copy of that same information a little less detailed now and this is where you can

edit the actions that were done in the live meeting and edit the notes and anything else that you want to

take care of okay um usually the first thing you do is is check the attendance that's going to be

probably on your roll call line um i don't know do we have our office members in here let's find out we

do i well we only have eric no all of them are in there are all of them current and i set their

terms for what they were which was before i had to add almost everybody because they weren't there

this was a five oh you know what i only got as far as the two ah okay that's why that's fine okay we're

just we're just playing we're just i'm just i'm giving you a tour it's fine uh so you know normally

you'd see your full list of people here but we'll just use it we'll just pick on air today it's fine

i'm going to delete all of this anyway because i don't want to confuse your history data history

so what you would see here is all of your members and um how they were marked in live manager and if

any of them were marked incorrectly you can update them and my question for you is is usually the

standard options are uh present absent and excused do you use anything else we do we use abstain and

recused for attendance oh for attendance i apologize no that's okay they are either present

or they're absent we do not have an excuse the only time we have an excuse is like if we know someone's

on we have a rule that if three if you miss three council meetings in a row you can be relieved of

your duty so every once in a while usually our lady council ladies get you know they have a baby and

that but they have to go on matt leave mark it as excuse so no one calls us and says well sally so

excused is you we should leave it in there because it could be used if somebody has a legitimate reason to

be on some kind of leave so i am imagining yes maternity leave someone could have a complicated

surgical event i was gonna say we had a council member who had a shoulder surgery sort of thing but

it's and i think 100 years ago we had someone who had military duty but it's very rare so we

should leave it in there because you when you need it you need it but generally you're not going to

utilize it that's perfect um so you'll just uh mark them you'll just double check to make sure they're

correct if if they were marked like the one i'm scenario i'm imagining is that somebody accidentally

gets marks excused when they really should have been marked absent and you have to correct that after the

fact per section because we do have members come and go you can take roll call as many times as you

need okay perfect so you can repeat it if they leave you can update um because you want to make sure that

you've taken you want to make sure your attention so legistar will follow the most recent one

so you know if you take it at the beginning and get through consent for example and then somebody leaves

take another roll call before the next voting segment so that your voters are updated does that make sense

yes cool so yeah we'll you will do that um if you took any notes in the notes area of the live manager

tool if the person who's going to be doing that is comfortable doing that using the notes feature there

they'll import back if min it does mindy take her own notes well see we have action minutes literally

move second pass fail we don't take their you don't you don't do verbatim anymore no and so the only

time we make a note is if there's something for for voting um if there's something really weird

yeah so you don't do things like say who led the pledge or who got up and read the land acknowledgement

yes for the pledge we do say who led so you might capture that real quick yeah so we so under roll

call we say we have a paragraph it's not a paragraph but it's something the effect of the

regular 5 p.m city council meeting and blah blah date was called to order at blah blah time by the mayor

and then we list all of our present members and anything else and then yes when it comes to the land

acknowledgement pledge of allegiance we do say bob led it um and for a closed session we do say

if there's a report out or not so i don't know why this is in the world's tiniest font

uh because it's in ariel eight why that's so small i'm gonna bump it to 10. uh so we have pre-built

legislator what we call standard paragraphs you can access them under the add key in the um notes

interface here and we do have a standard one for call to order and a couple of other things um i

can customize this for you but it's basically just insert name called the meeting to order at insert

time uh so that you put their name in and the time uh so that you don't have to type that out every

single time it's kind of nice to to have it and live manager i think has some um some some similar

shortcuts that allow you to sort of pre-build that so that they don't have to write it all the way out

um you know so the mayor called the meeting to order at i don't know 501 because they never start

on time that's just not gonna happen uh this would print um the one place in legislator where the note

prints at the top of the line is roll call so the note on the roll call line will come before the

roll call every other note will come underneath its area roll call special because we know you usually

want to have the call to order language at the top gotcha um and then you can also um put in notes for

you know who led your land acknowledgement who led your pledge of allegiance um things like that and

again if this was captured in the live meeting it'll all be imported in this is a rich text format i don't

know why it's defaulting to 10 point font that's quite silly so i'll i'll update those for you um

pledge was led by wendy i'm picking on you you let it today uh so anywhere that you do want to put a

note you can you can put that in there and that's usually going to be your quick acknowledgement types

things you just want to you know capture who who said that uh then you're going to get into your um

into your votes your first vote is your consent calendar because it looks like your special

presentations and general communications are not items they're just correct correct words they are

totally off agenda meaning we print a pretty rezo and it has nothing there's nothing in legistar

other than the placeholders on the agenda yeah because they they aren't items that require that kind

of thing so your first thing is going to be your consent calendar um and so that is actually captured

on a separate tab to just keep the experience really clean for you so on the consent votes tab

it gets even smaller and narrower now i literally only see my items that are marked consent and you'll

notice it took out the one that i unmarked so it won't get included accidentally we can now record our

block vote when they vote on consent they vote in a single single block except for what they removed

okay we're just going to once again hold down our very friendly shift key and highlight all of our

items we're going to select our mover and our seconder of course we only have one person in here so you

know eric is going to move and there isn't going to be a second and then we are going to just simply

record our all yes roll call vote by hitting all yes

and then we are going to hit our button that says standard action okay we set up in the administration

what the standard consent action is for every item by item type so agreements can be different from

contracts can be different from resolutions but i think everything for you is just approved

except for probably ordinances might get adopted but everything i think is just approved so usually

are yeah we have i mean we have a couple things normally it is um approved staff recommendation

or amended staff recommendation it's somewhere i can that's one of the things that as a so we're

going to need to update your action language to match and that's really easy to do if you have a list

that you can send me of what it should be i can make those adjustments i can also show you where

that's stored and you can update the language to what you think would be appropriate

um but like generally they're going to get some sort of variation on whatever your particular

language for approved is is what we're going to do and it's going to apply those all automatically so

you don't have to go through and approve each one individually it's just going to do it in a group for

you and then it's going to create a header line for a motion text that says that you know a motion was

made to approve the consent agenda and the motion carried by the following vote that language can also be

customized to whatever it should say for you uh but you know generally it's going to say who moved

who seconded and that this was to approve the following items on consent or whatever kind of you

know flowery we have very similar you prefer seconded by bob and sally um all the following was in a

single vote i i can't tell you the exact language but i get all that together if you can get it to me i can

make it work um and then so that's really easy uh and then if you realized that you made any kind

of mistake and you need the most common one would be at forgetting to unmark something from consent

um you can simply go back to the minutes tab delete this top line and it will delete the entire

consent agenda and you can fix whatever you did and do it again okay you do not have to delete each vote

individually so that's consent which is so freaking cool and super helpful uh but then we also have

our individual um items uh so for your public hearings um what type of action do they take on the public

hearings so it usually says something to the effect of the public hearing was closed because we're supposed

to do that um and staff's recommendation was whatever it was approved accepted so usually what we do is

if when we're in our the recommendation so if the recommendation is conclude a public hearing adopt an

ordinance and direct the city manager execute a contract what we do now is we go into that word

document and we change the tense concluded a public or you know held a public hearing adopted an ordinance

directed to execute a contract so we just use the recommendation we change it yeah so in this case

this i've had graciously picked a simple one so this one would be you know um conducted a public

hearing and adopted the a resolution authorizing the interns and we put in the resolution number yeah um right

okay so i think

i can do that by having the motion text i have to i haven't done this in a hot minute

but there is so this is how we build this motion text wendy it's in the motion text section because

we name things very cleverly uh is where we sort of build what the motion text should be so a motion was

made by the mover seconded by the seconder that this item type usually like so that might need to be

different for you was action name but we can we have some other things that we can do and one of the

options of information that we can pull back in is what we call the media manager motion text which is

literally the language from the from the dot dot recommendation that is perfect so i think that's

what we need to do and then all you would need to do because legistar isn't quite this smart and you're

just gonna have to work with me is add your ed you know adopted i'm already having to do that and the

problem with the way we do it is it's in words so you know it's a mess yeah so basically going back to the

the draft agenda we we when we're when we're right now remember we are making a word agenda and and

we're doing the plain text and putting it in media managers not moving over so whenever that that printed

agenda comes down then somebody goes in and changes all the words and puts draft in front of agenda

and then someone goes in and does all the eds and adds all that and they do if they could do it in the

system that is totally fine yeah so what will happen is i'm just going to go ahead and take um

any old action that's fine on here um just so that you know you can see where the motion text populates

so we'll just say that this was um adopted as amended and we did that on a roll call vote

and um our one little guy here voted for it mr gear all by himself so what i'm thinking um

is that uh

what we want so you'd be able to open up this motion text box and what i would be having it pull

in is a motion was made by you know bob seconded by alice um to close the public hearing um or that

this public hearing be closed and and then have it pull in the dot dot recommendation text so that all

someone would have to do is open this up add the ed to adopt it and plop in that resolution number

or ordinance number or whatever and i think that will be just a motion was made by bob seconded by

sally too and bring in the text well oh because if it was a public hearing with the words that's

already part of my dot dot text is it yep it is it just doesn't happen to be for this

well that's just because yes it's not done through oh it's because this one's already done

that's why somebody didn't catch that normally it would say or they took or somebody just took it out

because they went back and used report but typically it's in that it would or like it would be before

this and that isn't even a public hearing so i don't even know why that's in there but

it got pulled from consent and somebody moved it i don't freaking know but typically in the public

hearing recommended dot dot it says conduct a public hearing and and then whatever else they want them

to do like oh it's right yes here we go conduct a public hearing and upon conclusion pass a motion so

yeah we just needed to pull in the media manager motion text all i'm from the dot dot recommendation

and then just and then you just update it to be past tense yes that's really it that's all i need

and add your if it's an ordinance or whatever add that number yes that is all that's gonna change your

life i'm gonna be amazing life changed from the other stuff we did so all right um so you would just

repeat that ad nauseum until you were done uh and the key thing is just to get comfortable in here

so that you know especially if somebody's ramping up their skills on the other end of this equation

is to make sure they they actually got everything which they might not have done that they got

everything correctly which they might not have done and that you know and just making your updates and

your changes there and so then you just get to the end and then do they formally vote to adjourn or do they

just announce that they've adjourned we usually just announce okay so that would probably just be a

note that says you know there being no other business with the meeting adjourned at you know

7 14 or right um if they decide in the future that they need to actually vote on that you can vote on

headers in legistar you can take what's called a procedural action and they can actually vote to

adjourn if that becomes something that they need to do them in their seats to be do they're done they're over

it yeah couple of other funky questions for you is everything in the city of sacramento a simple

majority vote delightful um but i know what it is and it isn't we put it in the title oh that's amazing

occasionally generally we have these rules that you have to do these things before you can do that thing

and there are provisions for waiting that thing and so a title will say um like uh it's usually i

don't know oh see that one that says it's line item 13 where it says suspension of competitive bidding i

bet you that two-thirds because we um we yeah so in order to suspend competitive bidding that portion

takes a two-thirds vote of the council and this was on consent so yeah you know you weren't

concerned about it cool um so you know that that's that's called out for you in the recommendation

text so you can check that um so legistar's brain always works on a simple majority legistar has no

way of knowing if it's a two-thirds or not however if you need to force something to fail because it did

not meet that threshold it is super easy to do on the file update tab you click the center tab here and

just click your radio button that says set as failed and it will override the math okay so you

can just tell it if something actually doesn't clear that threshold you can just set it as failed

and then almost all of my clients who use that throw something in in the notes reminding the reader

that this required a two-thirds vote and didn't get it you already have that in your recommendation

text so probably would be pretty easy um we don't really have that as a problem but yeah well i see

like you know your your two-thirds here is already on consent so you're already presuming that it's

going to actually pass yeah unanimously and do they go ahead we use it in three different instances

suspending competitive bidding doing a different kind of noticing and skipping standing committees

and i could not tell you the last time that didn't pass yeah i would imagine yeah i mean it's like

they're not it's not super super common right like but we just i just like to let you know that that is

there because otherwise it's just always going to show us failed on a 51 um on a 51 percent so you

know it's really nice to know that that's there and they don't do weighted voting right everything

is one person one vote correct and does the mayor vote or not mayor votes equally perfect not a tie

breaker situation no ma'am oh my god thank you for making my life so easy right i don't have to do math

i don't have to like make them a zero a non-voting alternate there's nine and we just finger count

i love that for you that's what it is i i've been working a lot with the state of new york

and a lot of counties in the state of new york do weighted voting by population oh jesus no it's a

freaking nightmare yeah to go in and go into each individual voters um record and weight their votes by

how many people are in their district no no no don't even put that out in the universe well you

have to because that does not happen here well i mean it's just that new york you know my experience

has been the longer it's been a state the weirder no kidding right i'm from connecticut i'm allowed to

say that i i am allowed but yeah so you can just override that it works out really well do they do

everything just on a straight roll call vote you know put your hand up or say a voice vote unless we

think it's controversial yeah so it's an all in favor say i if we think it's going to be close or

a council member can request a roll call vote but that's usually a political statement you know what

i'm saying yes they want the specific dissenters on correct record so if you want to be able to

you know create a searchable by name you know experience for the residents of sacramento where

they can look up their council members name and and see their vote record i would recommend doing

it as a roll call vote in legistar that's perfect just so that you have that information because you

can then produce a document report for a resident that says you know this is how eric get out you know

voted for the last eight years and we get that request yes so uh like even if they're voting by

voice and not actually going down the line one by one i would still record them as roll call votes

just so that you get the data because a voice vote is just going to say this passed unanimously and it's

not going to capture the names for you no we don't want that we want the roll call okay so use the roll

call even though from like a technical roberts rules type of you know absolutely by the book definition

it's not really a roll call vote because you're not calling their names one by one but it really

is a roll call vote because they're not you know and then if in the future you ever need to have any

items that you need to capture that you've done something with them but they don't actually have a

vote associated with them there is a no vote action that's usually for your procedural um items

some of our customers actually do put their presentations and proclamations in as items we

capture them mostly at our standing committees not that it never happens to council where it is a

it is a provide receive and provide comment or provide direction sorry so we do have those

yeah so you can just do those as no vote okay and i think the default action that's in here is

probably received and filed so it sounds like we just need to update that to the right language yes

because we had a whole legal issue with received and filed so i will want to change that we can

change that to you know pancakes and bacon if you want perfect matter um this these can all be updated

you have never used this module so this is literally what it comes with out of the box um i saw that and

with all the other craziness i was in here i was like what crazy person in this office said we do well

they didn't it literally came out of the model that way um so you can let me i can actually run a

report of all of the actions that are available to you and you can cross out the ones that you don't

want and then just send me back like you know change amended into you know amended as recommended

by staff or whatever it might be okay uh and then my last question for you is you see this one called

referred down here that has the arrow and sent to that is what we call our transmittal or referral

function okay that allows you to do two things okay you can also have it show up on tabled or

continued or really any action um if items get delayed from one meeting to the next like if it was

going to be gotten to today and we're not going to get to it today and we want to punt on it to a

meeting down the road you can do a sent to action if you do a sent to action you you can pick where

you're sending it and the date and it will automatically update its um assigned meeting

date to the new one and have it appear on the new agenda for you remember coffee talk on saturday live

i'm a little declent that's uh do i need to give you a topic so you can talk amongst yourselves i do i

oh my god yes we will use that because there are things that are committee level not often

i'm sorry department level or yeah you know planning commission is the only committee we have that moves

up but things come from pmpe and standing and lawn ledge all the time to council so if you have an

item so that's the other half of this tool is you can actually refer it from one meeting body to another

so it has two functions you can delay it from its same meeting body to another meeting of that

meeting body or you can pass it back and forth from like standing committee to council council can send

it back to committee and you can keep that whole life cycle attached to it so the practice right now is

i am i am a planner and i am going to take something to planning commission law and legislation

committee and council so what i do right now is i write three staff reports i'm sure i mean they're just

using the copy function but they go in and they write their planning commission report and they

copy that to lawn ledge and then they copy that to council and then and they get their little agenda

dates all scheduled and then after planning commission happens they go into lawn ledge and update it with

whatever they need to update it and then after lawn ledge happens they go to council report and update

that with whatever that happens no you can do it all on one single item so if they start their item

planning commission pdc there are rare occasions when that planning commission meeting is going to happen

after we have published next week's lawn ledge but it needs to go to next week's lawn ledge

so how what is your level of confidence that planning is actually going to send it to lawn ledge

pretty high what i would recommend is how often is that is that like a regular thing or not so much

a regular it's fairly frequent semi-regular yeah and the same it it also is and then it's ultimately

going to go to council yeah and so my challenge is like if it's going to pdc on a thursday night after

we published for lawn ledge the next week but then even if it goes the part of the reason they like to have

them there well we didn't have we weren't aware of this feature clearly we had it is that staff

reports have a 19 day cycle and so my argument to you don't need 19 days is if you review the first one

we're not having these we're not having major changes or they would just go back to committee

they'd go back to start yeah right so so if i have a planning commission on thursday i will have already

published for my lawn ledge next week i would say this happens a handful 10 15 times a year

oh that's not too bad then i have some customers that this is just standard operating procedure

we try really hard for it not to be because you're you're you're organized and your meetings are a

little bit less on top of each other um no i'm just meaner than probably some of the other clerks

listen you know you could be the city and county of denver that um has a really compressed meeting

cycle my my where i live it's like they're doing this inside of a week yeah so um so there's a couple

of different ways to handle that okay um if it's pretty rare honestly i might just get in the habit of

manually sticking it onto the long ledge meeting at the same time um it won't generate onto the long

ledge meeting because it's in control of planning but you could add it manually by its id number

uh so you could go that way there is an a an advanced tool that you could think about whether

or not it will work for you that's called our multiple referrals tool and it allows you to sort of

how to phrase pre-build the minutes okay work like process for the items so that you know you've kind of

set the dominoes up to to fall um that is what our customers who have really quick meeting cycles

use you know so when they create the item they actually all just started out with council and

council then they just because council's ultimately who's going to own it and then council just kind of

refers it down um from itself to the committees and then the committees can refer it back up and that

will allow you to place it on those multiple agendas at the same time um it does take a little bit of

um practice to learn how to use that and learn how to use it well okay if it's not something they're going

to be doing week in and week out i would say either you know if they have one of those items that they come

to you or someone in your office and and say you know we have one of those items and you can handle it

yes um that way you don't have to teach a whole bunch of people something that they're going to

use like twice a year and never remember anyway because it's complicated agreed but the multiple

referrals tool works really well we have a number of clients who are using it really effectively um

and you actually have had legistar longer than that tool has existed which is part of the reason that

it wasn't initially set up for you is that we only built it in like 2017 or so the multiple referrals

the sent to has always been there but the multiple referrals where you know you can kind of plan

its life cycle um we actually created pretty much for a client and then we're like hey this works for

everyone let's let's just give it to everyone uh it's pretty pretty neat i'm still actually learning

the ins and outs of making sure multiple referrals works correctly myself because it's not super common

function um but you know if your typical life cycle actually has a pretty decent amount of time in it just use the

standard referred whatever actions we want to make referred sent to and just have them you know bounce

them bounce them along to each other um that works pretty well if they're not you know meeting on the same

the hardest one wendy is when the two committees meet on the same day we have had that's my least favorite but it has

always been a we know we know it's not you know when that yeah that's a thing yeah yeah it's not

something that someone strolls in here and says by the way we're moving from law and ledge to council

on the same day it does happen it i think i've done that five times in my life it's five times a year

but we make it happen yeah and and the thing is is like when you need to make that happen having the

multiple referrals function turned on and knowing how to use it will let you do that more seamlessly

and in a better documented way for yourself so i'll get that enabled for you and i'll get you

some documentation on how to use that and we'll make sure it's part of training but i think for

your normal process just using a referral action and sending it to the right committee and on the

right date will get you where you need to be because they sounds like most of the time probably 90 90 to

95 percent of the time they have a pretty good cycle going and then they don't have to make copies

anymore because that takes me back to

remember in the files module if things are changing substantially from one meeting to the next

you could start to employ the versions tool to um in insert version control so version one was on

planning version two was on ledge version three was on council which would give them the same sort of

outcome that they had with creating copy after copy after copy except that it would all be contained

within a single id number and that's great if it's changing substantially from one meeting to the next

like they're adding a whole new section right or they're changing the recommendation it's great to do that

if between planning and let's pull up an actual item if in between planning and you know ledge um

not that this would ever happen but like if it so happened that what they noticed between planning and ledge

is you know oh god we didn't bold the word motion can you fix that before the next meeting i wouldn't make a

whole new version for that that's i wouldn't that's a that's a typo but you know if they are changing

the recommendation you can just do a new version and then the original recommendation is what was on

planning and the new recommendation is what's on lot ledge does that make sense yes

it just it's really it's really nice it allows you to show your work

no i think that works oh amazing i'm so excited for you and then let's look at obviously this is

going to have like next to no information on it but just out of the box this is what your minutes report

looks like it's not very exciting and i'm guessing that we're going to need to doctor this up pretty

good yeah um i can certainly look at what you're publishing right now and and you know start working

on getting getting closer to that but also think about what you might want in terms of formatting and

style that maybe is a little bit different from what you have like if you could just do

like we don't even have your logo on here we should probably have your logo on here agreed

um i am going to tell you right now i hate the fact that your notes are centered i think that looks

terrible i agree to your motion text is centered too like this indentation is crazy it's weird yeah um

um do you usually include the same level of detail of the item sections on the minutes as you did on the agenda or is it more like

here's your title and yeah it pretty much because we're just changing the dot dot language it it can it still has all of the

you know the file ad and the location and then in what happens on the minutes is we remove the word recommendation and change it to action and then

change the tense of the dot dot language okay so yeah we're going to need to doctor this up for sure because it's just not you know but i can look at what you're putting out now and

and and start working towards getting closer to that and um uh we can work on the on the language but it would be so nice if you could just you know plunk it out of here and be be done agreed agreed

agreed because this is another so what happens now and i think you know it's a nightmare of hours and i think it's important because one of the things that you know i've worked here a long time and it wasn't really until 2008 when we did have massive city layoffs when we came back from that when you go to council when you ask your boss when you ask the city managers a charter officer for something that was the very first time that anyone was asking but what about the staff hours how much time how many humans that sort of thing we didn't

didn't talk about that we didn't quantify that before and now you know we do quantify those things uh but literally my team is pretty malleable and they're like oh i don't mind i'll just do this i'll do that so for what happens now in minutes is that mindy i don't actually know what the hell she does i think she does it on her laptop and gives us some stuff i don't so if i'm clerking the meeting i have a printed copy and i make little notes in the margin

and then someone takes that and puts you know goes and does the dot dot changes based on my notes and then we all kind of look at it so there's a little bit of back and forth and then we publish it as draft minutes and that can take a while i think i i think that if it's an easy meeting mindy does do it directly on her laptop during the meeting but if it's crazy of course she's going to resort to writing notes but somebody has to create the draft agenda template for her

and so every meeting somebody is creating this draft template for her to insert her information yes yeah whether she does it electronically on her laptop itself or she writes it in so there's all that time and that's something that takes an hour or two that they do on fridays so if we are doing if we can clean the format up and the second chair if you will does this during the meeting

comes back on wednesday morning runs that agenda minute report draft agenda report then pops into this real quick to clean up anything they need to add or i forgot a second or here or actually this was bob and then

he's like oh no he that's so-and-so left for that vote i need to go in and mark them as absent for that vote or whatever like it's always something 20-30 minutes to fix that shoot it off to mindy she's double checking their work because second set of eyes then it's done

it's done it's done your action minutes are done yes we do we spend an hour or two making the template on fridays no and give it to her and then after she

then we come back to the office after the meeting and kind of massage it she massaged it there's a lot of massaging going on and then finally it's done

yeah no yeah and so yeah this will really speed this a lot up

yeah and i think this too is probably the voice of frustration that any poor person at granicus who's come in contact like with mindy or me or someone at a conference we know this has to be better

yeah you're like what are we missing

right and so i will tell you too if this is ever you know something that is being discussed in granicus land

having the opportunity especially if we've been you know you've been around for a really long time

to have this i know we're calling optimization but whatever you know you want to call it it's i think

it's really important and customers should you know take the time to i'm sure there's some out there that

are fat dumb and happy doing the same thing we've always done and to be completely honest with you

if somebody in our office hadn't retired and we hadn't taken on the commissions i bet you would still

just be going along but now that we publish over 30 meetings a month we can't keep going along you just

can't keep on keeping on with that right anymore and and the thing is is like i mean not to

it's weird thank you for for men like i i created this program so you know it's always really really

nice to hear that people find it valuable like when i moved over to this team wendy my director at the time

it's you know i'd been on the team for like two days he's like what's the number one thing we could do to

make you know to improve our like not just improve the value to our customers which is very important

but also like the value of our team but just our projects for new legistar customers are fairly

far and few between like it's a big meaty product it doesn't get sold a lot because we've already

sold it to most of the people who need it you know what i mean no uh and he's like so what can we do to

make ourselves more valuable and to make the product more valuable for our customers and i said

um they stay on it for a really long time we should be helping them with that and making it

better for them and finding a way to interact with to interact with them again and connect with them

again because legistar is very intimidating to change yourself as a user yes it's very scary uh and

i said you know they should we should come up with a way to give them access to our team of experts

to help them do that and so he said great go invent it and i've said go make it happen go make it happen

and i did when you're the idea person that happens to me all the time i mean there's a reason he brought

me over to the the t i mean i mean i'm a legistar nerd i have been ever since i started working here i

love this program but also i am an incredibly process driven person i like creating process and i need

process to function because as i like to joke there's three hamsters that run my brain um

and uh they don't always want to be here uh so you know i need to help them out a little bit um

and and so having process for myself is really helpful and i'm like well what would help

if i was a clerk if i was a clerk's office if i was legislative staff what would help me what would

help me is not to have to try to fit into my already insanely busy day learning how to do

complicated administrative stuff in a program that i want to use what if i could offload that

to the vendor right i'd do it i yeah it's going to cost money because i'm getting someone's time

but how much easier is this for you than trying to do it yourself because if you try to do it yourself

you're going to try to fit it in right right tell me if that's going to happen no it's going to just

constantly get sunk down to the bottom of your list because you have a thousand things to do

and there's nothing wrong with that that just is what it is this is what it is well what you're

looking at there that's actually the wrong file somebody uploaded that is the template that they

put together for mindy so you see they put they take the time to change it the dot dot to action they

put in the blank space for the motion number all that so this is they they somebody accidentally

uploaded the template so somebody takes word and does all of this nonsense yeah this is hard to

take to the meeting yeah and then you're also you're publishing it here which no one is finding

correct ain't nobody finding this no well so this needs to be even if they were this this needs to be

updated well we need to go to insight so everybody should be every everybody should be going to insight

everything on insight is better yeah i will live and die by those words like um

so yeah i i mean like the only thing that the archive page does better which sacramento isn't even

taking advantage of is that the archive page is a lot easier to iframe into your city website

right so like it can be a nice like just you know having a secondary place where they can go and find

the videos or audio recordings um in line and your website is a little bit of a value but like

yeah nobody's i don't i think i don't think anybody's looking at this no i would guess that

your views on this are pretty low they go there to see the meeting but they don't yeah they don't

dig down to look at drafts and stuff like that yeah yeah and i i mean obviously you can't get your

minutes out until they get approved on the next meeting but i'm wondering if my favorite part so

what we do is you're approving four or five or six sets of minutes at a time i'm noticing that's not

that's not my choice but what we do here is if you'll notice that link even though that's not the

correct document says draft minutes so we take the time to put up draft minutes we never go back and put

up the regular minutes okay so i'm gonna show you so this is your oh look at

is it same brian yes one of my lovely humans did this for you i forget which one who you uh is it

john i would have to look through my email but they said they started it for me i just haven't

looked at it yet it's not live i mean live for us but not out there yeah

um so you know this meeting details tab here that has all of i'm familiar with it

looking conceptually we haven't really used it so let me go let me pick on my good friends

oh no they do everything on voice consent votes so i'm gonna pick on tiffany

uh and isn't a special meeting how about here

you can release those draft minutes without releasing the pdf so this is a completed whole

entire completed meeting life cycle for the city of napa from last month the minutes are

published the video is out and then this section here is filled in with all of the actions

the pass fail result and then if you click into here these were probably all on consent so

oh no here's an actual vote you can dial into the vote details as well okay um and what you can do

is if you put the minutes into the status of final in legistar and we can rename that

status to something else most popular is unapproved or unofficial yes because that status shows up

right here so we can have a secondary status there's there's we can we can have a status of um

unofficial or unapproved and then approved instead of just final um and you can actually have it so

that the unapproved or unofficial minutes still releases the draft minutes to the public because

all the public will see is this gotcha everything was approved or whatever right and then you wait

because you know i'm guessing it doesn't happen all that often but hypothetically your minutes could

get corrected when they're voted on it doesn't happen very often but once but it's the rules

it's the rules of the rules so then you can come in and change the status to official or approved or

whatever you wanted to call it and then publish the report so you could separate those two events

so that the report when when the pdf is there that means that they're approved they're official they're

done they're ready uh but when it when you don't see the published minutes but they're in a status of

unofficial or unapproved you can at least see the results because the results aren't going to change

the results are the results as long as you corrected them before you you know posted them

right it's everything else that might change somebody might say i mean you're not really

doing verbatim minutes anymore so you know there's probably not a whole lot that could ever possibly

get corrected yeah but like i will tell you what probably it never happens so it always gets messed

up but i would say that the city attorney has two report outs a year from that closed session

and it we almost always forget to put it on there because we're so used to it being none

and so it then having to actually put the report in he's gonna come to you and be like

wendy yeah we actually had a thing like yeah i'm sorry it happens every eight months what do you want

right and we just forget it that that is the most frequent and it's not even the council members

who catch it when they approve the minutes it's the city attorney well you know that's why they went

to law school to catch those things i guess um but yeah i mean it's really it's really manageable to do

so i mean i really really like that now you know and and it's just really nice to be able to

see that and then also you know your members of the public can see um actual actual votes oh agreed

like agreed and i think that once we get we start populating more things in the system so like

the um ability to search on the codes and the yeah it's gonna make it it's gonna make it so much

more valuable it will and that is gonna cut down on public records requests so in in california if

something is on your website you may first refer a requester to the website if they cite an ada issue or

you know usually it's somebody who has a technology challenge um we do try to to go beyond and help that but

if you call and say i want to see all the meeting minutes from 2020 to 2024 or whatever i have to

give those to them now because the approved are not on there but if they're on there here i can refer to

that you can say the approved fine you know final minutes for all of our meetings for 2024 are at this

website if you have any problems contact me back and then you can help them with something specific

because like you said it is it is some people have technology yes issues or i could see somebody coming

to you and saying well i want a printed copy of this one and then i don't charge them for that and

then they don't want to anymore yeah i'm just like well there's a i mean you can print things for free

at the public library actually i don't think you can put them for free at the library well you can do a lot

over here in our little library so but that's the gist of it and it's like that's one of the things

you know that's that's real efficiency and digitization right is to like our first position is to direct

you to our digital repository of that information our second position is that of course we're happy

to produce it for you because you know there's always a reason there's always an exception there's

always something that you know has to be different or whatever but like it's really really nice to be

able to um send someone you know to a repository that really has all that information for them right

i just noticed something you have that catch-all oh just assign it to christmas if you don't know

what date it is yes that's your trying to work around their workaround yep um but we don't have

the meeting hidden status in here for you so not that very many people are looking at it but that

meeting is showing up on insight so i think we should add the hidden status for you yes please

well i guess i can show on both

awesome because the hidden status just makes it so that you can only see that agenda

in legistar because i have a few people who enjoy spending their evenings with us so much

that they would see that christmas meeting and show up here yeah you're you have professional

citizens we do have professional citizens and one of them's bless his heart he has a small business

and um we all call him that he because he likes it we call him the cheesecake guy but he has cheesecake

business but um mr david i love that for him and he loves mindy our city clerk as we all do but he

calls her minty with a t i don't is it is it an accent thing or it's it's i think it's just he doesn't

really know it might be a tiny bit of an accent thing um but when we went went through covid

mindy was physically here in chambers running the zoom and everything because none of us trusted our

own homes to you know not have power go out yeah she was just sitting in a room by herself herself

pressing buttons that was a lot of folks yes so every so often and i would usually be up here

because then i could be the backup and stuff but we were separated and so you many nights mr davis

comes to the podium to opine on whatever he's opining on and anytime there's anything about

money or raises he says that nobody in the city deserves a raise but minty cuppy because she was

here for all these and she you know why are you paying people to be remote minty cup matt and then

last week he i don't remember what he was pissed off about last week but last week it was like

you just need to put minty cuppy in charge she should be this and mindy's dying she's like no no i don't

want that job but he is he is a delightful gentleman and uh we look forward to whatever

mr davis is going to share with us this upcoming week so he would definitely be here for a meeting

on christmas christmas and be like and probably get up and say it's not fair that minty has to be here

on christmas that he would say that minty shouldn't have to be here yeah that like i feel like that like

that's halfway between he really thinks her name is minty and like maybe just a touch of a rural

like what i would call a rural or country accent yes these tend to turn into these and these tend

to turn into the same i believe originally like as a very very young child he was from the south and

then he moved to del paso heights which is his neighborhood just a little bit north of downtown

and um there's that community i will say has a lot of colloquialisms and and different phraseology

and but he's just i if i had to guess based on what he shared i would say he's in his mid 80s

and he's out there and his great grandkids help him with this business and he refers to them as the

millennials he's like i got these millennials and they're telling me i got it like oh my god so he's

great but what's so funny to me is that depending on the age group like i feel like like generation

names like aren't like catching as much as they used to yes i still hear a lot of people in my mom's

generation which would be his his generation my mom just turned 86 this week bless her um anybody

younger than them is like a millennial so they will call anybody from like me on down to my niece

who's 13 a millennial i'm like i'm gen x first of all and and she's gen at 13 is she she's probably

an alpha i don't even know what they is she z or alpha i don't even know no i can't keep track

but yeah everybody tries to make me a millennial and i'm like

yeah i'm a little a little too old for that but yeah i mean i'm right uh like quite honestly when

i'm right on the cusp my i i am of that that very small generation that never actually existed i think

like like gen y for like a hot second and they were like nah no that's not gonna take off uh and and

they just keep moving where gen x ends and millennial begins and my birth year is always

right because i'm late 70s babies so yeah no it's very interesting because um so i have um two of my

nieces well one of my no two of my nieces have had babies another one got married in the last couple

months and both my sister and i the aunts were a little out of shape because grandma sounds cool

but great aunt sounds old and yeah we were joking about they can just call us auntie and and we're like

that's funny because that's what i all every aunt in our family gets called auntie and i was like

because you're not going to call it so then my my little sister's like we could be grants i'm like

okay i could get behind that but great aunt that just sounds like grand aunt yes you just sound like

some spinster in a house yeah was cool like yeah well because like i think that is like because i had

women that i called great aunt when i was when i was growing up and i did i thought they were a

thousand like um uh and like i've just stopped doing all like i just don't differentiate anymore

i'm like everybody's just like you know auntie or or not and like i also have like if i can't remember

how you're specifically related to me i just lump you into cousin and i stopped trying well and my dad's

first cousins you know they're obviously all his age so they were uncles and aunts even though they

weren't yeah and it just yeah it's just yeah basically i'm just like it's fine yeah as long

as you are polite and you do if an adult told you and you're a child you have to do it doesn't matter

who the adult is that's kind of the you know yeah but no it's fun it's interesting we have like i said

my niece got married her sister just had a baby and then there's two brothers and one of the brothers i

think he's going to put a ring on it pretty quick with his little girlfriend who's absolutely lovely

um so just a lot of generational change and my sisters and i are like oh my god we're those people

now we are the people that we thought were old when we were kids yeah i had that experience a number

of years ago um uh so i'm from connecticut uh so i grew up uh in a part of uh in a uh like a very

um jewish part of my city so i had a lot of jewish friends growing up i did not grow up jewish but

you know very exposed to that culture so i went to a ton of bar and bat mitzvahs when i was a kid

i think between the ages of 11 and 13 that was like what i was doing every other weekend it feels like

for like two years as all of my friends and schoolmates and everything were going through that

particular experience and my best friend out here in colorado um her her son is is jewish

uh and had his bar mitzvah a few 10 years like seven years ago now eight forever ago and i was

invited as her friend and i had that exact moment that you're talking about of like oh my god i'm the

adult at the table i'm i'm at the adult's table in the corner i am the table full of people that i

thought were old and weird and why are they here yes and even last night or saturday night at the

wedding it's like oh yeah your mom has friends right well the wedding was sweet and then we had like

dinner and you know they're doing the toast and all that stuff and then we're heading more it was all

the same building but we're different places and we're going to more the reception where the dancing

and all that start and you can see the old people peeling off i was part of the old people peeling

off yeah and you're like oh what has happened to me i know and i'm like and she's got all her

girlfriends and she doesn't need us hey it's very it was very cute it was very cute i i you know i am

very lucky that they as i will call them kiddos and our family have selected excellent partners but

still made me feel just a little bit old yeah yeah i mean my my brother's oldest son just finished his

junior year of college and i just don't know what to do with that information and then his middle son

just finished his freshman year at my alma mater and i'm like that's weird like why are you at my college

and i'm like i finished college 25 years ago that i'm not okay with that not okay with that truth

it's so strange but i i didn't go to my 30th high school reunion this year but it was like three weeks

ago yeah no i'm not much of a reunion girl but no i went to my 10th because i still lived out there

for my 10th like i lived in massachusetts but like it takes three seconds to drive from massachusetts

to connecticut like the states out there are so small yeah that's because people are like when you

say something like tri-state area they're like oh yeah you mean like arizona nevada california no

no i do not no i mean i can go to like nine states in a day not the same it's not the same

no no when you go out east it's it's crazy it's like i i think one of my like to try to make people

understand it um because i've lived out here in colorado out west for 18 years now so like this

feels more like home than anywhere else you know it's the longest i've ever lived anywhere that isn't

the house i grew up in uh like somebody has done it where they've like placed cat like you know

scrunched the map so that california is next to the eastern seaboard on the map so that you can see

how many eastern seaboard states you would drive through to try to drive through california from

north to south right and it's like would you like the it's the equivalent of driving from like

new hampshire to orlando yes they just can't wrap their head around it no and i don't know if this

happens to you but my east coast friends also so i'm in sacramento that's about a six six and a half

hour drive to la but they think they're just hopping down to la for like a friday night well

they not only are they go to la and they're like oh can i come up and see you um but we're about an

hour and a half two hours from san francisco so san francisco has an earthquake they call and check

on me fire la has a fire they call and check on me i mean i'll know there's a tidal wave somewhere

are you okay yeah i'm two hours away from the beach it's it's not that i mean i think i can allow it

if if it's in san francisco and they check on like if there's something going on in san francisco they

check on you two and a half hours isn't really that no far and like for earthquakes like earthquakes

can be really like yes they can be felt pretty far away so like i can but like you know if it was

centered off of the coast of san francisco you're like oh i didn't even notice right yeah they have

a lot of those sorts of things and and you know and it is nice we had i went in my private life i volunteer

for a service dog organization they're in santa rosa they're about two hours here too and they had

massive fires and everybody they have a campus there we actually had to evacuate the campus or 101 dogs

on campus and about 32 people who were um receiving disabled who were receiving their dogs so getting the

people out was was actually harder than the dogs um and we moved those dogs off campus and disseminate

amounts of volunteers across the region and so you know in that case there's hundreds of volunteers for

canine companions so the messages and everything finally i had to like go on the national group and

say i'm going there it is going to be okay staff knows what they're doing we know what we're doing

give us like 12 hours to get these dogs and quit asking we really really appreciate you stepping up to

try to help but you're actually distracting us right now and we need to concentrate yeah so well and like

people want to check in and everything like that and it's like there are a lot of things that i hate

about social media and like mass communications and finding them really frustrating and exhausting

and i don't think a lot of them are good for us but to be able to just post something

that says here's what we're doing we're fine we're fine and i appreciate that too i i actually had a

friend um in in france when the just we surely um bite or assault happened the weapons attack happened

and um you know or you have i did not have but my sister had friends who were could have very well

been they were not at the actual pulse nightclub so again in those critical instances where you can post

this is a place for you know people to go find out about people or if you need to you know move at all

those sorts of things then i was very i mean i was very grateful for having those things here

i mean i lived here during the aurora theater yeah um casualty event and i'm a nerd i had so many

messages that were like you're not you didn't go to a midnight screening like and of course it was a

midnight screening and i was not at a midnight screening so i was asleep and so i woke up to

like so many panicked messages and like to be able to just hop on a facebook or whatever and just be like

absolutely i was not out last night i am fine is there's a lot of value in being able to communicate

that that kind of information quickly yeah and you know so important we had friends who lived in

vegas who would not likely have been at that event or on the strip in general but you never know when

someone's out doing something no so i mean yeah it's scary out there it's nice to be able to

let people know that you're but then there's plenty of other crazy things that i just go oh

my goodness i can't believe you really posted that i know i mean that's the thing is is like you know

in between all of the important life updates and like making sure people are safe and and things far

away that are happening like hurricanes and yes lizards and tornadoes and whatnot there's you know

way too much drama yes and way too much oversharing of things that i never wanted to know so i'm very

careful about how i use my right social media it's not it'll make you crazy well i think um not that i

don't believe all of this hasn't been um very helpful and it's certainly making me optimistic i think

today was a banner of a day um well i'm pleased to hear that um work on some minute stuff and just kind

i'll just pick some yeah um yeah we just need to update those actions and such so that you know

they match what you need to be able to do that's amazing yeah that's amazing and so we'll wait to

hear from the design team about um getting those numbers off you already fixed the issue of the

repeat fix the other thing so there we go and then um yeah i think that that report is like nearly there

so it's so close so if they can just get that information in there for us and take the text out that

you don't need yeah that could really make that usable that would be great yeah all right um i should

know all of that later this week so i'll let you know what i hear and i will look forward to that

bye