CITY MANAGER’S REPORT
Library Annual Report
Bruce Flanders will present an overview of the activities of the Lawrence Public Library and accomplishments during 2003.
Douglas County Emergency Management/ Project Community Alert
Teri Guenther of Douglas County Emergency Management will present an update on Project Community Alert (PCA), a program designed to heighten awareness about severe weather hazards and the importance of preparedness and early warning. The National Weather Service, Douglas County Emergency Management, Cottin's Hardware and special guest Mr. Jack Elrod, writer and illustrator of the syndicated Mark Trail cartoon feature teamed up to bring Project Community Alert, an initiative to save lives and prevent injuries, to Douglas County and Lawrence residents.
PCA's goal is to educate the public about the importance of early warning and emergency preparedness, and to place alarm-equipped, programmable all-hazard/weather radios in homes, businesses, schools, nursing homes and other special facilities throughout Douglas County. The more of these radios in the community, the more lives will be saved and injuries prevented. The program is a continuation of the effort to make sure residents are promptly alerted to severe weather and that they know where to go and what to do to prevent serious injuries or deaths.
The Midland all hazard/weather radios offered through PCA use technology that allows owners to program their radios to specific county channels. The radios feature alarms that sound automatically when perilous weather alerts (and other natural and technological hazards) are broadcast by the National Weather Service. Through the use of localized broadcast warnings, the technology targets specific counties for individualized alerts. Previous radios generalized warnings to regional areas and frequently created alarms that were irrelevant to many communities.
Community Blood Center Recognition
Mike Hadl, Senior Maintenance Worker in Public Works Department’s Street Division will present a Certificate of Appreciation that has been awarded to all City of Lawrence employees by the Community Blood Center. The award recognizes not only the 319 units of blood donated by employees in 2003, but also the support of the center and “spirit of donor volunteerism”. Hadl worked with the Center to receive the certificate after noting that the Center was calculating the blood drives held by individual departments (including Police, Fire/Medical, and Public Works) separately rather than as a single organization-wide total. As a single organization, the City of Lawrence is among the Center’s top five donors for the Lawrence area. In addition, countless donations occur by City employees as individuals at the Center that are not included in a drive total.
Staff Award
The MidAmerica GIS Consortium, a nonprofit educational organization that fosters the applications of geographic information systems (GIS) recognized the City’s GIS Coordinator, Bryce Hirschman at its biennial symposium last month. Hirschman received an award for Outstanding Contribution in GIS Coordination. Hirschman works with surveyors and engineers to decipher a century’s worth of platted legal descriptions and used coordinate geometry to digitize the city’s plat base layer. Another successful project for Hirschman was the digitization of the majority of the City’s sanitary sewer system based on engineering records, resulting in a highly accurate sewer model that can be used to meet all types of regulatory requirements.
Employee Survey Follow-Up Activity
As a follow up to recommendations and information provided in the 2003 Employee Survey, “Communication” was the topic of conversation between members of the City’s Management Team and Employee Relations Council (ERC) at a joint meeting on May 5th. Topics covered included:
· inventory of current methods/tools for communication used by various departments
· analysis of which tools work best to communicate throughout the organization
· discussion of barriers and challenges to effective communication
· review of “best practices” utilized by other organizations to enhance communication
· listing of suggestions that departments can use to enhance communications within the organization
The next step in this effort will be the preparation of a report by an ERC committee studying effective communications, utilizing the results of this meeting.