Agenda - Council - 04/23/1996 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Direct Solicitation of Potential Candidate One of the candidates for the part-time transcriber position seemed to have the qualifications we are seeking for the secretarial position. I contacted her about the possibility of doing minutes. She has minute taking experience, but was hesitant because of the degree of formality of minutes such as those kept for the Planning Commission. I sent her copies of Park & Recreation and Planning Commission minutes. I suggested she could start with Park & Recreation, then add Planning Commission when she felt comfortable. I also explained that she could tape the minutes and transcribe the public hearing portions later, that most of the detail is available in "cases" prepared by the commission liaison, and that the liaisons are very helpful in finalizing the minutes. After careful consideration of all this, the candidate called to say she didn't feel comfortable with the level of responsibility "official" minute taking involves. She also said that if she could do the wordprocessing at home instead of making a special trip to City Hail, that would have made the position more attractive, but she doesn't have a computer. She said the hourly rate of $8.99 was not a deterrent to her, but that it might be to others because minute taking is more complex, in her opinion, than transcribing. Staff Recommendation I am reluctant to require any of our current employees to attend evening meetings and take minutes, unless that is already part of their duties. First of all, they already have full schedules during the day. Second, it takes more time than necessary to process the minutes because of constant interruptions. Third, none of them want to do this, so requiring it causes morale problems. For these reasons, I prefer we try another option. Qption One: We could increase the wage for this position from $8.99 per hour to $10.39, which is our minium rate for the Recording Secretary. We could then re- advertise the position, with the requirements that qualified applicants need demonstrated experience in minute taking and wordprocessing. I believe we should also offer qualified applicants the option of doing the wordprocessing off-site, submitting drafts for commission liaisons to revise, and submitting final minutes in hard copy. (City policy prohibits us from accepting diskettes into our computer system. Once official minutes are produced, we shouldn't need them in the computer except possibly for indexing. We could scan the hard copy into the system, if that becomes necessary.) This option would cost approximately $3,901.40 per year to cover Planning and Park & Recreation. The disadvantage of this option is that if money is not the deterrent, we still may not get any qualified applicants. Option Two: We could contract with Timesaver to do Planning and Park & Recreation minutes from May through the end of the year and try to hire a part-time person, starting in late October. If Timesaver works well, we could contract for another year. The disadvantage of this option is that it is more expensive than Option One. The annual difference in cost between Option One and Option Two is approximately $459, less if we