[Music] Scott County providing safe healthy and livable [Music] communities all right next we're on to Scott County delivers um on the topic today of public records thank you to uh our presenters and panelists for joining us today and I believe Chris Harter will kick it off good morning Madam chair good morning Commissioners um as as uh commissioner wmre he said we're here today to talk about public records and this is a little different way to bring some topics before you and you're going to hear some information today that we haven't previously brought forward to Scott delivers so we're looking forward to a good discussion and uh really appreciative of the panel of um folks that we have with us to talk about that today um we're going to talk a little bit about the vital of uh accuracy and efficiency and that's really what drives these programs it's how they're measured um and these are programs that look at the collection creation maintenance and distribution of records that the public relies on for kind of a general source of Truth for landing tax and possession and permits and all those things so we have some um program level data to share we have some business measures we have some new data so um we're just excited to have conversation so with that um I'd like the folks the other facilitators to introduce themselves and then if you all just introduce yourselves in which program area you're from where we going all right Jake ging transformation Enterprise Services director Greg sson Chief Information officer Danny lens Office of Management and budget Matt MCC GIS Sher Schmidt Sheriff's Office Michael Thompson County Assessor and property and Taxation services manager Ron HCK data privacy coordinator Julie Anon Community Services property and customer service manager all right first question I'll kick on page seven as far as voter turnout when we look at obviously the president presidental election years are higher we talk about percent here is this percent of all voters that actually um or you know all people could vote or all registered voters what's the percent Baseline here that would be the um percentage of registered voters okay yes is there any we talk about kind ofk marketing and getting the the voter I mean do we have an idea how many people that can vote aren't registered and are would there be any mechanism or marketing guys Outreach you could do to try and get more people to register I honestly don't know um what our total eligible population would be um that's a really good question we certainly are looking to um get the word out in populations that maybe haven't voted before in partnership with the secretar State's office um and especially in our election judge recruitment that's a lot where our focus is this year trying to recruit um judges of different populations whether it be age background those kinds of things um so we'll definitely work with the Secretary of State's office and see if we can get some more data about where really is that number um I certainly know the population of Scott County versus the registered voter count um I'm sure you know we have about 154,000 people in Scott County and our registered voter count is hovering right about 98,000 so how many of that 56,000 are minors um or folks otherwise ineligible to vote I'm not sure okay little over 40 would be children children perfect thank you Julie along with that just as a followup the legislature made some changes last year and who is and who is not eligible to vote and I'm just wondering if you could say something about impact you think that might have on um your work going forward into this next election sure um the the biggest change I think last year that the legislature made was changing the eligibility of someone who'd been convicted of a felony versus someone who is incarcerated um in a lot of ways this is making our job much simpler so it's a lot simpler for us and it really is a lot simpler for the folks in the the community um it was very complicated before the reports we would get from the Department of Corrections um were a lot of times based on soundex so it was the sound of someone's name it wasn't that necessarily maybe they were the one convicted of a felony but um someone who had a name that sounded similar so knowing that our information was as accurate as it could possibly be we did a lot of research with the attorney's office those kinds of things now it is if someone is in front of you they're able to vote and for our election judges and folks working in our absentee rooms across the county that's just going to make things a whole lot simpler thank you going on to page 11 please slide 11 I have a question for for Ron um so this dat is pulled from Gob QA and there's a little bit of information in the narrative but Ron can you can you give just a high l overview of what gov QA is and why we why we have that software and then my question about this particular slide is are we trying to get to 10 like 10 is listed as the Target and when I read the about this measure why does it matter it sounds like 10 is more like the maximum like we we want to do the work in at least or no more than 10 days so we don't want to hit 10 as a Target we want to stay as far below 10 as possible so can you just address the the uptick and the time but before you do a little overview of go QA sure so statute says when the request is for an individual so if you were to request your own records we have 10 business days to respond to that request if the data is not on you if you're requesting statistics or just general data we have a reasonable time to respond so we set a maximum hopefully of trying to get all data requests done in a reasonable time which we feel is under 10 days again each data request is different some of them are much larger and are going to take more than those 10 days uh depending on what they're asking for but the goal is to keep them on average below 10 days especially when we legally have to when it's data on the individual um does that answer your question on on yeah about the 10 days and then just a little overview of what yep what that is and why we have it gov QA is a new software that went live in Scott County on August 30th of 2023 it's a place where we put all of the DAT requests throughout the county um before that if the sheriff's office for instance got a data request the sheriff's office would deal with the data request and if they had a question with it they would forward that to me if I couldn't handle the data request it would go on to the attorney's office now every single dat requests whether they need my assistance the attorney's office assistance from from the sheriff's office or all departments go into gov QA so it gives us a much larger view of how much time all Collective departments are spending on data requests how many we have throughout the county uh what the time frame is are we all answering them in the same amount of time are we all invoicing them for statute are we all doing our dat requests in same ma manner whether they got to the Sheriff's office or customer service or HHS or whatever department they might do so it kind of streamlined the data request process to give better oversight over all of it give us a better idea of what the scope how many we have and how we're responding to them and puts all the data in one place and makes a lot easier to make a pretty chart thank you as a followup Ron I've heard anecdotally that people are feeling like we're getting more data requests now that we have gov QA is that just a feeling or is there some reality to that just so I've heard it from Department to Department um Building Inspections is one I've heard it from I don't know if it's a coincidence I don't know what they were getting prior to that because a lot of building inspection ones don't go to me never went to me because they aren't that complicated but their claim was that they're getting more I think ER might think they're getting more as well um because we have no prior data showing us that I don't know if that's just an anomaly that they happen to be getting more and it coincides with C Q8 going live or if it is we're getting more data requests I don't know would there be any ability to query gov QA to see what other jurisdictions are getting in terms of volume of data requests so we could do some comparison um I can query other jurisdictions and that I know are using govqa I know Ramsey County Olstead and hennipin are using gov QA and ask them if there's some sort of trend something that curious about because we don't have a long-term data is there a certain time of year where we get more do we get more in the winter do we get more more in the summer when kids are off of school I don't I don't know we don't really know any Trends or anything yet because we haven't had that data long enough um to get it long term it's most of these are month-to-month stats that you're looking at because we don't have year to year yet um but yes I can reach out to them I can't go through gov QA because I don't have access to their system come on well I could I could request it probably would give them access to ours though I mean the nature of some data request is there's private data within the request itself can you give me medical records on me well that's private data just by showing the data request so I doubt they give me access to something because it's going to be limited to need to know Ron you referenced that this is a relatively new software for us and we don't have a a track record would would it be fair to say like as we were working on this conversation with the Commissioners that we kind of created some new ideas about some other fields some different things that we could be tracking as the system matures a little bit yes that that statistic you just show it on the number of days open I don't think we had any idea I mean we assumed I think on maybe on a DAT request by dat request basis we knew that this one was perhaps beyond the 10 days or things like that now we know the whole picture of of it and we can look at the ones that go beyond 10 days and ask ourselves why they didn't pay an invoice might be a reason or they never responded but the dad request remains open um I I do think there's other things we can measure as far as again what's the total number throughout the county um prior to gov QA I did get data requests and they were probably about 20% that I saw of what seems to be we get about an average of a 100 data requests per month prior to that I saw about 20 and I think the attorney's office probably saw five or six of those 20 um now we can see the the broader scope of it about 80% more that we can see right okay okay thank you one last question the topic so we look at the number of days and we the topic also like how much is paper charge which we'll get to later how much dat do we have do we get any sense when you're looking at the request we're fulfilling are we fulfilling request the data that probably should been purged so that may be taking us longer as far as how long are we saving data how good are we have purging data with his retention schedule and then if we don't do that does it wind up taking us longer to fulfill data request because we have more data than we should have that's a good question that's jumping into retention um if there's a data request and we have the data we have to produce the data even if it's been here for 30 years and we could have gotten rid of it two you know after two years we have to produce the data if we have it I'm aware of at least one case where we've had to order our our data from our off-site storage bring it here go through the box identify whether we even had the data because we weren't sure what exactly was in the box and that delays the process a little bit um I haven't looked at data requests to see how much data we're putting out that might be on Beyond retention that we never had to answer I I I should say I I do recognize it sometimes when there's a dad request and we have an email go up from 2009 I I know that that shouldn't have been there um and that's an individual thing where somebody didn't delete their emails um but I I I haven't gone through all of them to say well this one had we been following our retention schedule this one would have been a simple no data exists response I haven't done that if I could okay so I said the last question but I had another one um what are the sorts of data requests the sheriff's office gets by Source what do you mean we get a lot from just the general public yeah like what are they requesting so because there's a pretty large volume for the Sheriff's Office overall for here we get um lawyers that are looking to settle like suits and stuff where their clients that will be requesting different accident reports um we get a lot of jail records know the um booking pictures we get a ton of um mostly just basically my neighbor had the cops over there yesterday what was going on so we did a lot of that gosh I guess it just kind of really varies a lot of accident reports a lot of criminal cases that somebody was in Ron is there kind of a flavor to what we get across the rest of the organization for the types of requests from what you see um the I can tell you what gets to me a lot of times would be lawsuits um personal data especially in a child protection or a domestic dispute where there's a divorce going on and the one party wants data on the other party that type of thing employee relations has a lot lot of complex dad requests that most of the time they handle within employee relations but I know they exist um others are um the re-entry house was a popular one we had a lot as the board knows on the re-entry house in Prior Lake um different things around the county like um construction projects we might have a lot of that stuff you know not necessarily construction projects we can lead them to public sites where we have the data already stored which is the easiest thing we can do other than say the data doesn't exist um HHS a lot of their stuff is Medical Records I want my mental health records my medical records that sort of thing my benefits that I got I'd say that's the majority coming out of them and those types of things because they it's like an accident report in the sheriff's office because they get them so frequently I never see them or rarely see them unless there's something in there that's a little bit different like you know I'm going to court and there's an investigation and I need this data and it might have some caveats to it other outside of the normal I just want my accident report um and then building permits there's quite a few building permits that I didn't realize were going on and it's a wide variety you never know what you're going to get really until you get it sh just because your department is involved in a lot of these requests how has Ron's position like that position was kind of reconfigured the database is new how's that changed work in your office um in some ways it's made it easier because well even when Nate was here we have a contact person and because we know Ron so well because he used to work out with us yeah it's really easy to go to them when we have a question on something okay we we've had some complicated ones come in that is it okay for them to have this because I'm not sure and so he's been really easy to work with on that so it's good for us okay so just that ability to kind of talk through what should we release and what can't we release and all those things okay and he doesn't get mad when we come back with the same type of thing that's nice isn't it thank you okay thanks so on the following slide page 13 we start to get into the physical storage and the the scale of this slide I think kind of masks the impact from 2020 through 2024 um because reducing that that cubic footage by more than 1,300 cubic feet that's that's real progress compared to the previous years so I'm wondering um my first question is just like how's the shift to paperless going Greg kind of brought this up as we as we move toward having everything in systems and less me like let's conduct it on paper how is that shift going and how important is it that we continue to drve Drive our business away from paper and into systems that don't rely on physical storage so I think it's very important um we have dropped that number from 2023 if you look that number 10490 we've actually dropped it now I think it's 8,900 it's gone down a couple hundred more because the stat was given in March but um when I was hired to this position one of the things I was told is we want somebody to have a eye on our off-site storage and if we can reduce the amount of things in in our offsite storage because govqa was coming along I was kind of tied up in that but as soon as that went live I kind of refocused my energy on this at the end of last year started reaching out to multiple departments um and just asking them I i' export what they had out in offsite storage into a spreadsheet I would then go to my retention schedu retention schedule and say okay this one to me looks like it's beyond its retention period I try to make it as easy as that for them as possible and then I'd email them and I say hey here's 50 boxes and I these are what I believe based on the description are in those boxes if you agree those can be destroyed I will do the work I'll destroy them for you I'll do all I try to make it as easy as possible and in that process we've lowered um since January our off-site storage by by about 20% uh the cooperation from our departments in doing that is no I haven't had any push back most of them are kind of on board yeah if you can get rid of it get rid of it um but we still have a lot out there um I think it's important to go paperless for a number of reasons I don't like the idea of our data when we had that one data request for building permits that I talked about having our customers have to wait multiple days longer than they have to and us pay a fee for them to take that box up the Shelf drive it from New Brighton down to here we pay for the transportation deliver it here search through the box find out whether we even have the data if we do we get it scan it in and then we call the customer and then somebody pays an invoice on all of that stuff the following month to me that's time wasted um it's poor customer service when we could have if we had a database like City View for Building Inspections possibly where we could have stored that and found out immediately yes or no you've got that data we could have had that done in minimal time um not to mention the data security of having trucks trucks crash having trucks taking our vehicle our private and confidential data back and forth to New Brighton all the time if something happens to that truck our data is going to be flying in the wind um I like the idea of having it in in the Cloud I I think most people do I also understand there's some situations some Vital Records where we have to have a solid paper copy of it um so I don't know that storage will go away I don't know that we have to hire a vendor to have off-site storage in today's day and age we have a number of letg the Sheriff's Office used to have a lot of data offsite they don't have one slip of paper off site anymore it's all in LG um we have a lot of databases like ssis and um going to think of some others but Traverse Traverse where we could store some of that stuff in my mind at least and again I'm not the business that does that so it's easy for me to say it's not necessarily easy to do but I I think it's you know one thing that shocked me in in the conversations I've had is Michael actually brought it up that Scott County didn't have anything in off-site storage prior to 2005 and here we are in 20 almost 2025 halfway to 2025 with more space than we had in 2005 more technology than we had in 2005 20% less records than we had four months ago and Court admin's working on a project where they're take they have actually 40% of our offsite storage they're going to eliminate all of their offsite storage so we're going to have half of what we had hopefully within a year and to me this is a perfect time if we're going to ever do this and I think somebody we will do this to to eliminate as much if not all of our offsite storage as possible so Ron I just want to add though so there's some context to this before when we had Central Storage we had staff operating it and the cost far exceeded the cost of the storage so there was a time um I see Julie nodding her head there was a time when the cost to store was far better for us because of the lack of space and the cost of a couple people running a central area that the decision was made by those at the time to store it now I agree we didn't have the technology and the scanning and those types of things that we have today so I'm glad we are taking a look at that but there were a lot of very good financial reasons and decisions why that was made at the time yeah thank you and I don't have the historical perspective I didn't really set eyes on this until October of 2022 um and started paying the invoice and went what in the world um and I was given the directive of putting eyes and try to reduce the aite storage so that's what I'm trying to do so oh go ahead so you know paper's tangible we can see it we have to pay invoices for it to store it and so it's easy to say we have too much we want to get rid of it and we get dates on boxes technology poses a different challenge I mean some systems we have I I know for a fact they don't even have Purge routines in there to get over all so what are processes what are the triggers because it's so much easier to have technology you when it saves it it's just like it's in the cloud we don't get charge for it there's no repercussions of it and so what are the processes that you could potentially see to make sure that we're is we have as good a hygiene with electronic storage as you're doing now with paper storage so I don't have a solid answer for that I I do think there's some steps that Scott County can do to reduce I think in in fact I know it's happening organically even without my intervention some Department most departments are reducing their off-site storage without me having to talk to any of them um this year there's only one Department that's put anything new in offside storage only one since January um HHS I just found out last week hasn't put anything out there probably since 2018 or 2019 um the attorney's office has reduced their their inventory by almost 20 25% on their own this year without me having to say a peep to them because H HHS and the sheriff's office is probably the most successful but HHS and the attorney's office have a process in place where they actually take their boxes back after a certain period of time seven years 10 years I'm not sure what the period of time is they go through those boxes at the beginning of each year and they only return the boxes that have to be out there and one strategy I have that I kind of like in my mind is um to reduce our offsite storage organically would be to stop sending new boxes down to our offsite storage and when we get boxes delivered back for any reason whether it's a DAT request and building permits that box doesn't return it stays here we figure out how to scan bit by bit piece by piece and it's automatically going to scale down and we're going to reduce our our transportation costs it's one strategy I think that it's very manageable that I think would have a long-term effect Without Really impacting the business um flow of the different departments Julie uh in in the course of these conversations I there are some records from your area that are difficult to get rid of or diff or difficult to store can you just talk a little bit about what the challenges around some of those kind of oneoff kinds of records public records absolutely um in my area we have both the vital records meaning marriage birth and death um we also have the land records documents so they're kind of two different stories um the vital records we have had all of that scanned and now have uh put that electronically into its host system whether it be VP um or recordes so we've been having conversations with Ron and with the Historical Society about um we have an electronic version but the history particularly of the vital records is something that the historical society is definitely interested in so we have a plan for about 55 books that reside um in our off-site storage to go to the Historical Society the land Records books are a different story um those are the they have all been scanned and put into our recordes system or um are temporarily stored and will be put into our SharePoint system recordes does not host everything um so we will be putting some records onto SharePoint but that is the record right that is the only permanent record that we have of land ownership in the county uh we have had maybe a dozen or so instances since this project has been complete that we have found that there was a record missing so if from the scanning process from the scanning process absolutely um if those records go away if those books go away that permanent record goes away as well so none of us are comfortable with disposal of those books the historical society is not interested in those books um we have not talked to the local Historical Society about that but there are hundreds of books it takes up a lot of space um so yeah kind of two different routes for those records but um we didn't know until we had a conversation with Ron actually how we were being charged for storage of those um and how we will be charged for storage of those in the future and um it's a good number thank you thank you for laying that out [Applause] uh Matt on page 17 as far as devices used to access the JS data there's been a a pretty good increase um in Mobile kind of utilization of that information how what have you done or how does it impact what you do and how you deliver stuff to make it more mobile friendly to cause that number to go up uh yeah so we leverage a platform um our vendor ezri has provided us with a development environment that allows us to do Development Across multiple devices at once so we build one application and it's serving the desktop version it's also allowing us to test in different mobile devices whether it's an iPhone and Android and even a tablet all at the same time so the technology has kind of integrated itself into a way that we can build applications right out of the gate that uh function really well on all devices and it's really helped Drive our utilization um SG three our main application what we consider the gateway to what we provide for public information it's um was built a little bit before that time but it's still very mobile friendly and so we're looking at um in the upcoming development cycle on enhancing that to make it even more mobile friendly and try to drive this number even further okay so when you're looking at your utilization and there's this chart on page 16 um are you able to track what people are actually accessing like common um ways and is there any discussion about adjusting the system to more default are those ones that 90% of people are going to or to have easy buttons to get to those types of things as opposed to the list of clicks and stuff yeah so we have uh integrated metrics with all of our platforms so the open data platform that the uh board adopted in 2015 that allowed us to provide free and open information public information that we have attracts the metrics automatically so this is a cloud-based system where we upload the data and then the public interacts with it to download or interact with what they need that is a very good point we probably haven't considered making like our parcel data set which last year alone had 3.2 million requests probably one of the most requested data set items in the entire County I would assume um we haven't discussed how we could deliver that in a simpler fashion but I do like that idea another question on this for page 16 have we looked looked at any kind of um associations of what might impact the number of requests so if you look at you know 2023 just the trend was higher overall then we start to get into 23 and 24 like in my mind is interest rates impacted or something like that do we ever kind of try and look at that sort of uh correlation no we haven't this was kind of the first time we pulled together this moving average and we kind of see that it spiked like last summer last fall and we were hypothesizing why that could be and what we came came up with is that we onboarded a few of our uh Partners we have City and tribal partners that also use the open data site as API that means they can connect right to the service and consume it directly for their own internal um uses and even for some of their public workflows so we think that last summer that that might have been when Shaka and the smsc kind of came on board and started using these apis and then it's kind of trending downwards but it's holding steady um according to our metrics we have about 8,7 100 daily requests which is quite a bit um and because it's a cloud-based solution we can handle that um capacity you know there's no strain on internal resources to do so um we have not tried to correlate it yet but I do like that idea as well Matt do you you know as we're thinking about public information public records what the public wants to know do you do you know what your next steps are as far as layers of data that people can pull off of a GIS site like what's the future for this yeah so we do um we do obviously allow with taxation uh land records um we've increasingly are moving into permitting stuff so um a big addition that's coming online this week is conditional use permits and interim use permits so you can see those all over the county we have the dots on the map already and you can get the information behind that we pull that from City View which is our permitting system the thing that's coming online this week that we worked in partnership with it was to deliver the documents from recordes so not only can you click on the point and get the information which is great now you can pull the actual cup or iup document which has been uh requested by our townships um as a needed functionality so that's uh coming online this week Beyond that we are working um with taxation again uh they are a big user of our services and we're making um a lot of layers for them to help with the um review process and the quintile process and so we have a bunch of land characteristics lers that are going to come online for them soon that will help them with their processes of valuing property and that kind of thing um those are the two big ones that are on the horizon nice thank you so C me a s question so you talk about accessing you know recordes City whatever various things and so we're all about portal these days right we want every kind of business system to have a portal um but you know to what level do we develop portals in these kind of systems or kind of a land base because from the J perspective perspective it's all in one spot so you don't need to go to multiple spots so do you have any idea maybe Michael to you a little bit too how much time do we invest and really getting all the information in the business portal if GIS is really the centralized portal and seems like with iup cups we keep putting more layers there that kind of makes sense it's a center repositor has all information in it where's the balance between how much we evolve our land oriented portals to say let's just get the data into GIS because that's more Central serves with all information where's the balance that's a great question I'm not sure where the balance is because we can provide that functionality I don't know if we've thought that to that extent but um yes we have talked at times like the conversation even with cup and iup came up is why are we storing this in the system it is in when we could just store it in the central GIS and then we could do it that way so these discussions do come up but I think um there's the nice thing about GIS is it plays so friendly with all of these Enterprise systems so whether it's you know a Tyler for taxation data or a recordes for the the documents we can plug into those apis and just consume the information without having the users do anything so we don't need a lot of help to set that up so even if they do have their own workflows and they're putting that stuff there if there's an API we can usually get at the data just us there's no other staff time that's needed to do that and then display the information so it's it's kind of a nice Synergy but I haven't given it a lot of thought um about how you balance like putting it just in GIS versus keeping it in its own system it's a interesting discussion okay Michael do you have a thought about that are we talking about having appraisers enter information into GIS rather than the cam system no just really from what the public perspective right so the public goes out wants to get information which is do I go to do I go to the City View portal do I go to the Tyler portal what portal do I go to if we want to make it easier for the the citizen um do we just say yeah there's portals there but let's try and make sure all of the citizen request information there's always exception I get that but do we make the gis are kind of portable of all portals we make sure the data is there and more easily accessible and we can cross tab information between the various systems just you know something to think about yeah I think the public would appreciate that I don't know what the effort would really be um because there's so much data coming out of our tax system and that portal that they they access to put all of that in GIS rather than link to it from GIS I we don't know what the efforts would be yeah correct and the the nice thing is though is that your your taxation system is going to do many things that you need for your internal processes that we can't but what we can do and what we do do is show the direct link to the portal so for instance if you are in SG3 and you click on your parcel and you have a building permit we link directly to the City View portal and pull up your permit automatically so it's almost like a seamless integration like you don't know you don't really have to know what portal it needs to come from if you're familiar with GIS and we push that as kind of the place to get access to everything you'll click and the experience will be fairly seamless to just get the information you need without even knowing that you've jumped to a different portal Michael um Matt was talking a little bit about reviews and and some of that property information that's going into um into the gis system can you talk a little bit about alternative reviews alternate reviews alternate yeah uh the alternative reviews it's an exciting Innovation that we're we're just implementing starting last year and it deals with the collection of data so we have a statutory requirement specifically for our office to review property information on every property in the County once every 5 years so it amounts to us historically visiting physically 12 to 13,000 Parcels every year it's one of the biggest time consuming processes we undertake every year and uh the alternative reviews allows us to if we can check certain boxes which for the first time last year we added the high resolution street level imagery so we had a company cycl media drive all of the Cities we did not do the townships because there wasn't a cost benefit uh justification for it just due to the spacing between properties and then the challenge was sometimes uh being able to capture properties from long driveways and things like that but all of the cities were driven and if you think kind of like the Google street imagery it's like that except we can zoom in and we can see cracks in siding and shingles we can tell property conditions um it gives us in certain situations data we can't even get when we're out at the property due to fences and things like that um and and what it allows us to do is bypass the physical inspection on the majority of the properties where we have that data uh it's it's not just an efficiency gain uh it's also better safety for our staff um every year we tend to get some dog bites but even more scary things we've had guns pulled on us uh so if we can avoid going out and and involve our our staff in some those situations that's a safety benefit um and then it's a benefit to the the property owners because we've done surveys before and we've been told by onethird of the population the assessor will never come into my house under any circumstances no matter what so when we go out to those properties we're we're kind of spinning our we're wasting our time uh for for a review that just will not be completed and then in in the majority of the remaining situations they might allow it but only with an inspection or or sorry with an appointment and that's just would never be efficient we wouldn't have the staff to schedule 12,000 inspections and then get them done on a time when people are available going from different neighborhoods coming back to neighborhoods um so there's there's also I think a customer service aspect of us doing a good job of collecting the same data uh without uh bothering them or intruding on their their privacy so um we're hopeful that in another few years after we've gone through a full cycle we'll be able to look at the before and after and and compare an entire fiveyear period to to the subsequent and see that we did gain a lot of efficiencies we drove a lot less miles uh and that our results are still solid and that the data that we collected was still reliable nice thank you so you're you're going to keep us on the edge of our seats until 2027 yeah we're going to make you few results of that yeah you can't quit before then okay um I'm going to ask you I'm sorry I'm going to apologize come and ask you a question I wouldn't want someone to ask me if I were sitting on that side of the table so I think if like if I were a taxpayer I here in this in this particular Sky count delivery there been a lot of them we talk about efficiencies especially efficiencies driven by technology process change great we're going to be more efficient I'm hopeful that at the end of the current quintile we'll see lots of efficiencies what what happens with that time then now especially now if you're look if you're sitting in 2024 looking out to 2026 20127 we talk a lot and this is not this is not you specifically we as an or talk a lot about gain deficiencies and I think we talk a lot less about what what do we then do with okay we gained 15 minutes per transaction in this process what did we do with that 15 minutes yeah over over time so if if you have the next two to three years to think about that do you already have ideas or will you give thought to what might you and your folks be able to do with that efficiency gain yes we we already know that um it will open us up to be able to spend more time on the analysis which has been lacking I mean we do a great job but it's it's time that will be spent dialing in analyzing the data the sales and really probably producing better results in the end it's ALS we've also got a long list of projects that we never have time to get to I'm sure other departments are familiar with that issue and with a growing County we're adding thousands of of parcels through uh subdivisions and new plats that are being recorded we're building I think it was almost 600 new houses last year that creates additional workload for us and we're hoping it kind of staves off having to add FTE that otherwise definitely would have had to been added and I think our our apprais section hasn't added an FTE um I'm trying to even think back the last time we created a position in that area and it's it has to have been at least like seven or eight years ago and it's through these types of Innovations why we haven't with the growth of the county had to match that with FTE growth I wanted to give you a chance to talk because as we talk about technology and efficiency certainly customer services experienced some of that um um do you would you just talk about some of the work and and our data is a little smooshy on on weight times because we haven't had the technology in place for as long as we'd like yet um but can you talk a little bit about um on page eight and page nine actually even just about how that customer experience has changed for people that are coming through customer service absolutely uh we talked about customer service weight times I believe it was in March um and got some excellent feedback from the board about how they'd like to maybe see uh this data displayed differently so we worked with your team to do so and um the experience for the customer has changed greatly if you look at uh the one on page eight that gives us weit times um in 2020 preco I'd like to add um our weit time was at about 34 minutes our average weight time currently is at 7 um now remembering that that's an average so there were times you know we always joke about feast or famine there were times that there's no one here um you could walk right up to the counter and for some reason some people just had that luck right they'd always walk up and oh I can always just walk in here and then all of a sudden real ideas hit and our lines are getting longer and we have times of two hour Waits so so um the days of twoh hour weights are long gone um which is wonderful for everyone involved customers don't want to wait that staff don't want to feel that stress um so the way we've been able to implement that is with our appointment system we are doing a hybrid um the last time we talked about this we were doing a hybrid as well and we have not changed that methodology drivers license ID and passports all require appointments um when we say require appointment ments like for a driver's license if you come in today and we're full we can get you in tomorrow you know we are not booked out weeks in advance um in the driver's license area the passport office does book out very very quickly but for all of our other services is all just a walk-in service so now when you walk into the customer service passport area downstairs um whereas there used to be what we would call a Cataline of folks all the way down the hall You Don't See see that anymore and we have worked really really hard to maintain and try and tweak how long appointment times are so that we can give customers that in andout experience um we always talk about how educating folks are residents on driver's license in particular is a long process because you only renew your driver's license every four years um if you move in that time yes you need to come in change your address but it's very um you know cyclical so sometimes when folks come in and they hear that we need an appointment um maybe they're not very happy about that they'd rather walk in um they state that they would rather wait in that two-hour line but then they come back for their appointment maybe the next day or maybe in even two hours and then all of a sudden their their visit has been reduced to um maybe a seven minute wait time often times less for driver's license and then 9 10 minutes to actually get their whole transaction done they're in and out very quickly so am I correct to say that you have reduced weight times even with the increase in the number of transactions that are happening absolutely okay so you have good data on all this kind of stuff but do you have any data because the technology you guys are implementing the average time for transaction you have weight times and that kind of stuff but what about are is your time for transaction actually also going down it is um and part of that is due to that implementation I mean speaking just about driver's license um the real ID implementation the first time that you come in to get a real or enhanced ID or driver's license there's a lot of paperwork it's very confusing um statute is very specific on on what your document needs to be so that firsttime application um can be timec consuming but as people come in to renew or even change address and as staff are getting more familiar with the systems and the documents and they're making enhancements to our M drive system uh we're actually have a new version of the system coming out here shortly um it does it just keeps getting quicker it's never going to be a 30- second transaction but um it it is getting to be reduced when we first started the No Weight inside system to be able to get our data um and Jennifer Donnell is here so she'll correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the enhanced driver's license was taking us 24 minutes um and we are down to about 17 so we've cut out a good um length of time for that and it's actually enabled us to we really kind of waterfall out the appointment times when we first started your regular standard renewal we gave 15 minutes um your real ID and enhanced we did 30 because they were much more involved we've been able to go to all 15minute driver's license appointments with the knowledge that some of those are going to take a little bit longer but some of them are only going to take nine so um we've been able to really change our workflow and and help the residents much more efficiently Julie what would you look at in the future if you could go to the legislature and get anything passed or whatever it was to make your operation more efficient I know you guys you think and just constantly thinking about that sort of stuff without sacrificing anything like what would just make it easier and more efficient the first thing that I can think of um that would a make it more efficient for us as well as uh much more satisfactory for our customers is the ability to print titles on site um we went to the legislature a few years back and asked for the ability to print duplicat titles um and with Cindy G and moo we were able to get that passed so we have the Paper Stock we have the ability um we all have the knowledge and we enter all of that data on the front end now the state is just giving it its final you know look see and approval at the end um we've talked to the state about printing transfers and maybe it's it's restricted to certain types of transfers maybe it's not a salvage inspection and very complicated you know something like that but a you're selling your vehicle to your nephew or you're giving your vehicle to your nephew and it's a very simple transaction um I'd really like us to have the ability to print titles on site that would be a a huge win for everybody uh is there a last question from this side of the table otherwise I have one last question okay I'm just wondering oh go ahead okay um just as you all were talking about um coming to talk with the Commissioners this morning is there anything that you learned out of this process that changes how you work or what you know about the roles that each other play did you pick up any benefits from this from the prep for this conversation the answer is [Laughter] yes I picked up a lot personally um this has been a really kind of unique right this is a unique presentation I think for us um we all work together we all know each other but to really dig down um I mean other than as a user of GIS I don't know that much about it and to sit down and talk about all the improvements that have already been made over the last few years and the things that they're looking to do in the future um was fascinating to me and then I'm learning better tools for myself to serve my customers as well um working with Ron on this offsite storage project um in particular has been really great I've known Ron for years and as Sher said he's fantastic to work with um but it's to me it's not only the the learning about how everybody does things but it's that deepening of those relationships I always appreciate that so um I learned from the off-site storage project too um not everything can be stored digitally the exam best example is your land records but I think the attorney's office has confidential information that we probably and and same with HHS we probably do want some paper copies I don't know that um will ever get off the necessity of having those documents stored somewhere but I think we can reduce it to a very man ible and minimal cost and amount that's offsite so you're seeing some opportunities in that way right I think we have a lot of opportunity to reduce but I don't think we'll ever I'm not 100% positive we have to store them where they're currently stored yeah but I think we're going to have some paper documents that have to be maintained forever somewhere right uh with that um Madam chair I think I'll turn it back to you thank you thank you very much uh I have some comments and questions but I'm going to turn to my colleagues first commissioner alri yeah uh Michael I'm going to ask you this or and I'm not proposing this I just want to explore the topic um in terms of homes uh knowing what the condition is what inside and outside is does Ms allow you to do a grab of data like of pictures and all the data it would seem to me that if if you could grab the picture data and then have it attached to that record you know if you could I mean in a 5-year period you'd probably have at least a third of the county with MLS data pictures and all you know uh is that something that's MOS will allow is it is there privacy issues there or I mean I'm just curious of how you how you could improve what you have so you don't have to go out so much I know you you get the street view but that seems to be just skimming the surface basically yes uh we do have uh MLS Accounts at in our office and we do use that information to manually review properties when they sell we don't have the ability to take their data uh and and use it for assessment purposes it's it's a a rule that you can't take any photos out of MLS directly and use them for another purpose purpose or you're not supposed to copy them for any other purpose uh but we do find that there are a lot of public websites that take that data and then broadcast it through other real estate companies and their public websites and those tend to also have the disclaimers and warnings that that's um you know not not for public consumption but we are uh are for public use or copying those off for other uses so we do have access to and we do use it and we do glean information uh from the interior photos through MLS uh but we do not take anything and save it off thank you good question you know I do have one more it it's probably in a side but I when you talk about public record records I think of public record too you know we've had Freedom of Information Act requests and I I wonder where does that fall in terms of Staff responsibility some request information I know that our our laptops our phones and and everything else is kind of public record if we use it for County businesses so how do where does that where does that fit in this picture and um yeah if I and also could just suggest for the future for newly elected uh whether it's County Commissioners or city council or whatever is um they need to know you know what is available to the public upon request you know and and what are Best Practices well the Freedom of Information Act as a pertains to Federal documents and federal data we follow under the Minnesota Government data protection act so I'll talk about or data Privacy Act um so data in general you just said the data on your cell phone and the data on your laptop are all public and that's not entirely true um if it's private data it's private data it doesn't matter where it originated if it's confidential data it's confidential data so an example of confidential data might be a conversation about a legal matter with Ron hos ofar here where you've got attorney client privilege that particular thing might be on your phone and it might be on your computer but a DAT request isn't going to get it unless you've got some sort of a legal um subpoena or something that allows us to release it uh private data is the same thing if you're talking about a medical situation with employee about an employee with ER maybe that's private data that's not going to release your on your computer or your cell phone um so it's really the the classification of the record or the data is going to dictate what gets released well let me if I could comment on that based on something that happened years ago there was an application for a gravel mine permit and they did a freedom of uh information request and they forensically went through our laptops and our phones and to see I'm sure they did a work a search you know with the terms that would be relevant to the to that topic but but we had to turn in our laptops and phones and so forth on that okay so you no longer have to do that we have something called eisc Discovery where that's just being done would probably notify you it's being done or after the fact that it's been done but eisc Discovery there's um Genie myself or um Goodwin and it can run keyword searches on just your emails or um any of your data and filter it out and find the things that are pertinent to a data request and from there we'll determine what's private confidential and public and redact in some cases the private data if we have to this this required even though going on to their personal cell phones and their personal email accounts for the directive of the court so it was a rather depth um process that we had to go through so it was a little bit different than just even checking our County system and even with um a county phone what Ron's talk about anything that's kind of Microsoft based then that need discover can handle that so if you're basically using your county issued cell phone doing text messaging standard text messaging that is not discoverable through ecovery and So based on what they're going after there's more than likely still on the cell phone at a minimum have to turn it over and look for more information because we don't have access to that centrally yeah law enforcement actually did a forensic check of all the cell phones you're exactly right Greg the other thing commissioner I was going to add is that um based on everything you've heard today and some other items um our staff is undergoing everybody this is a required training with Genie and with Greg um a 90minut training on data and records and attention and use of system um the five of you will also be invited to that so yeah this is required for everybody within the organization that's not the reaction we get normally thank you wonderful thanks for those questions yeah one question uh Ron you mentioned um invoicing with I think it was with the gov QA tracking request and invoicing for those requests like can you explain how that operates because there's that balance of cuz I I don't exactly know how that works like when we invoice when we don't because there's you want information to be available like so when you invoice what if I need a request on I I don't know whatever like what as a as a citizen okay I have to pay the bill for what like what does that that Minnesota statute 13.03 allows us to charge a reasonable cost for the time it takes to collect data so if we have your data immediately available in a lot of cases when it's stored in Traverse ssis letg we do have that data readily available and we can provide it to you in under 15 minutes uh if we have something where we're contacting multiple departments and we're going to spend staff time to collect things and it takes three or four hours you're going to pay for the staff time that's what's considered a reasonable cost to collect the data um we can't charge to redact private from public data so if we spend time redacting we can't charge for that if the data is on yourself the county made a decision to allow the first hour to be free so if it's on yourself it's not going to generally if it's as on yourself it's going to be a pretty simple request usually not GW but um it's when you're requesting things on you know and we we we have one employee relations right now that's taking well over uh well I don't want to say how much it's taking a long time and the person on the other end is probably going to have to pay for the time that it collects before we release the data so it's not necessarily operated as a profit Center it just cover the cost it's covering the cost of employee time to take if if I have to take Julie out of her Lane to go and gather data for a DAT request they're actually not going to pay for Julie they're going to pay the cost of the lowest paid individual who could have gotten that data even if it's Julie who got it will charge based on the lowest was paid employee at Scott County who could have gotten that data based on how much time it took Julie to get the data does that make sense yeah it does it does it's you know it's that balance again of not having and that's all in Statute in 13.03 I didn't know if it was 133 or 031 and I just know we don't make money on any data requests at all we are 100% of the time the loser on that um because when you're talking about redution right that is a lot of time and usually it's someone who's at a higher salary rate who has access to that data and has a business purpose to see it well and that that was my understanding but it's just a great time to kind of clarify that that it's like you know we're here to do answer those questions as they come in uh but also at the same time it's like you know to be expected some amount of money that I too that most data requests we don't charge for however we want to be consistent when we do we don't want to and that's something that QA has helped us where you know why aren't you charging for this one or I don't think we've ever said why don't you charge for this one because generally if they come to me they're generally going to take a little time one way or another do you ever provide an estimate ahead of time yep we provide an estimate before we we so if there's going to be a cost I might ask ER what how much time do you think this is going to take so they're guessing it's a it's a guessing game because we're not going to pull the data if they're going to say well I'm not paying that why why spend the time collecting the data so we'll we'll send an estimate to the requesters saying that this is what we believe it's going to cost are you willing to pay and if they pay then we'll we'll provide the data and you'll get firms from across the country that'll just this is their business they go and they pull all the stale check data they'll pull property data all that sort of stuff and sometimes writing that price up front can help save a lot of Staff times are like no not worth it for us thank you thank you you have anything I don't have any questions but thank you very much for the information all right yes thank you I I just want to comment on a couple things um in my non-commission life I use recordes a ton it's wonderful staff have been wonderful I think helping real estate professionals attorneys throughout the communities and in using it and I appreciate Jake's question because yeah I used to I used to bug you guys a lot more before that data was easily accessible but we know there's more to do also so thank you I mean just as a user of those Services it's it's been wonderful and and and efficient um yeah thank you all for this presentation this is really foundational important government work that even we don't think of very often but I I can imagine the average taxpayer never thinks of it it's our duty though to do this work and do it well to protect data to um be efficient so I I think somebody this morning asked if I was excited about this presentation must have been you juliean and I'm like yeah I am I am really excited about it um glad to hear from uh the administrator about our mandatory 90minut training because during this I was thinking about we need we need contined reminders about especially email retention and tips and like I think we should be just that should always be in front of us because you get you get lost in it and you forget um one other thought I had is every single County in Minnesota is dealing with these big land record books has there been any discussion on a regional Statewide basis because I I get it most of it scanned in it's we almost never need them but we can't get rid of them that's a an important record any any any thoughts on a regional or state basis for storing all these books not that I'm aware of U but that'd be an excellent topic uh to bring back to our macra and makeo groups and and start to discuss um I know there have been some tragedies throughout the state you know books have been in a courthouse basement and there's been a flood y there's been a fire you know those kinds of things so um no that's a that's a really good thought that we could start to collaborate and and talk about what everyone's going to do in the future and how we can do it together I mean the the organizations do work together so wonderfully that uh yeah bring that forward great well thank you for the good information and and thank you more importantly for just the important work you all do every day