Development Services Review. Final Report. Zucker July 2016

See our discussion under the “Expedited Review” heading in the Policy Issues section about recommendations to improve the process.

Given the City’s budget constraints, we agree with the City’s current practice of proactively updating fees to capture all costs for application services.

In addition, it is not clear whether the “Preliminary Plan Review” fee (e.g., Non- RDCS) captures labor costs associated with Council review, which we understand is an option in addition to the applicant receiving Planning Commission review. 98. Recommendation: The fee schedule for Preliminary Plan Review Fee should capture council review fees and show separate fees for Planning Commission Preliminary Review and Council Preliminary Review.

Email System

Most of the Staff interviewed reported that the email system is ineffective due to insufficient storage capacity (e.g., 100mb). As a result, staff continual has to manage emails to create additional storage capacity for daily incoming emails. In addition, while emails can be received on smart phones, they can’t be managed by a smart phone, which creates capacity issues if staff is out of the office for extended periods. The capacity issue also makes it difficult to retain important emails related to processing and chronically prevents staff from successfully transmitting emails to the Director as the emails are returned due to the Director’s email being full. 99. Recommendation: The Community Development Director should work with IT to identify email storage capacity issues and increase capacity if needed to resolve the issues identified. Filing Systems/Records Management We received a lot of adverse feedback from staff interviewees concerning the existing filing system in the Division. Generally, interviewees reported that the system is a mix of paper files stored on-site, electronic files in various locations and archived paper files stored off-site, which can frustrate research efforts and hinder processing. The following summarizes the responses we received:  Files are in paper format predominantly and need to be scanned and archived;  Paper files are stored onsite throughout the office and offsite in a separate building. Records archived offsite are retrieved via a records request that takes 2-4 days to retrieve;

Morgan Hill, California

95

Zucker Systems