Board of County Commissioners - workshop

Good afternoon. I'd like to call the Board of County Commissioners meeting on June 2nd at 1 p.m. to order. And if I could have Mr. Sarman do the salute to the flag. Yeah. He's wearing a jacket. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.

We'll move to roll call, please. Chair Andriola. Present. Vice Chair Garcia. Here. Commissioner Hill is absent. Commissioner Clark.

Present.

Commissioner Herman is absent. Sorry. Chief Deputy District Attorney Mike Large. Present. County Manager Kate Thomas.

Here.

And I'm Yvonne Strickland, Deputy Clerk. Thank you.

Well, it's exciting, right, to have our workshop about some great topics that I think are going to be very interesting. And I'll go ahead and kick it over to Manager Thomas, please.

Thank you. We are on to public comment. And public comment is welcome during public comment periods and limited to three minutes per person per public comment. Unused time may not be allocated to other speakers. And please make your comments to the commission as a whole. Laura Wetherington.

Hi, Laura Wetherington for the record. Thank you for your service and for the opportunity to speak. I want to especially thank Commissioner Clark, who is my commissioner, for all he's done for the library. I want to encourage each of you to do all you can to support literacy and self-education in our county. I'm the mother of a kiddo who's learning how to read, and he's also learning how to navigate the online catalog. And last week, he checked out 23 joke books. And all I have to say about that is, why did Socrates like the French fries? Because they were made in ancient Greece. When I told my kiddo I was coming here today to ask you to support the library, he had his own message. He wants you to know he's seven and he thinks that the computers are really good at the library. As a bit of context, he doesn't have computer access at home, so having access at the library is pretty special to him and it's pretty special to me because I know when he logs in with his library card, the computer recognizes he's under 18. and automatically applies restrictions to the computer, and he's got access to computers in the children's section where the tables and chairs are just his size. So I've come today to ask you two things. One ask about the training for the LBOT, and another ask about selecting future trustees. As a parent who's geeked out about reading, I was heartened to hear that you all are already considering minimum standards for all your boards. In the last year, I heard a library trustee reference training they'd all taken, and I applaud you and them for that. As you consider what they might need going forward, I want to ask you to consult with the new director. If I understand correctly, the constitution of the library board is somewhat unique within Washoe County. I think that's because it's both a volunteer and a governance board, but I want to say this is not unique nationwide because many library boards are constituted this way. So my first ask is that if you haven't already, please include the new director in your conversations about the best training options and protocols for the LBOT. My second ask in your conversations, oh no, sorry. My second ask is about selecting new trustees. I know that the county and the school district are both facing budget shortfalls in the coming years. Good luck with your workshop. And that is why I want to see people appointed to the Library Board of Trustees who have experience with Friends of the Library. The Friends is the main fundraising group for our library system outside of the tax structure and grant writing, and I think their work is going to be indispensable in the coming years. So someone with connections there or an interest in that fundraising work would help round out the current board at a fiscally insecure time for the county.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have nobody else signed in. I do have an email to be placed on the record. Thank you.

All right, great. We'll move now to item four, which is our strategic planning workshop. And I'll turn it over to Manager Thomas.

Thank you. We are here with our third of the strategic planning workshops and updates to the board. Today's workshop item is going to provide information on topics including learnings and preparations related to emerging technology, county focus and priorities for digital information delivery to review efficiencies gained from targeted messaging and how services are delivered to residents of the county. I'm going to turn it over to assistant manager Dave Salero.

Good afternoon. For the record, Dave Solero. I just wanted to talk through a little bit about why we're here today. So we really need to discuss the changing landscape as it relates to the use of technology and the overall needs of our community expects related to Washoe County services. With the explosive use of artificial intelligence in just about every aspect of everyday life, our citizens continue to expect more faster. As I'm sure you've experienced, this creates risk that needs to be thoughtfully negotiated to strike a balance between providing the service our community expects with the information necessary to fulfill the requests. So the information we have is an asset that belongs to our community. However, the information is many times jumbled with work product. And that can make it very difficult. AI doesn't care what the information is, whether it's truthful or not. It just utilizes the information to provide an answer. So you'll hear a little bit today about kind of the quality of our data and some of those other sorts of things. And again, this is the community's data, right? It is their asset. And then layer on top of all that a diverse citizenry that wants to be met where they expect to find the services they're looking for, whether that's in person, on the phone, online, on social media. via email or sometimes even in their own front yards. So there is no right choice, and our community expects all forms of communications for all of their needs, which stretches our ability to provide that level of expected communication. So strategically, we have some solutions that need, and we need to better understand the direction you are all willing to go. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to our first group of presenters today to talk a little bit about our technology landscape, and some of the strategic priorities. So we've got our Chief Information Officer, Bizaad Zemanian, our IT Manager, James Woods, IT Manager, Quinn Corbulick, and our Assessor, Chris Sarman. So with that, Bizaad, please go ahead and take it away. So let me jump in really quick. So there are some questions. You guys have been provided that beforehand. Again, just trying to get some feedback from you after the end of the presentation, just some of your thoughts. So go ahead.

Thank you. For the records, my name is Behzad Zamanian, Washoe County Chief Information Officer. Thank you so much for the opportunity to discuss technology at our annual planning workshop. Today we have a couple of topics that we thought is important for this group to put on the table and discuss it. This is a perfect platform to discuss a couple of things such as how do we do more with less? We keep on talking about using technology to do more without adding head counts. And how do we use technology to do that? The other topic is that where in technology do we want to invest in? I thought these two topics would be important for us to discuss today. So this is what we call an iceberg model. The iceberg model simply says that what is at the surface is only possible because of the massive foundation supporting it. What I've tried to do here is to kind of show what the community and staff see at the surface, which is you have an email system, we have a website, departments use software, so what? We have technology in police cars. What the community does not see is that there is a massive amount of technology infrastructure that goes to support that. And that is true about existing system as well as new systems. We keep on talking about let's bring AI, right? But there is a massive amount of infrastructure related to every new technology that becomes available. So I've listed a couple of examples of the technology foundations, such as cybersecurity, data centers, and GIS environment. We have application support. We have a help desk support staff and so forth. And these are just some examples. Today, we're going to look at a couple of those as examples of technology foundation. One is cybersecurity, and the second one is disaster recovery and business continuity. With that, I'm going to hand it over to James. James is basically our operations manager overseeing technology infrastructure. James, take it away.

Thanks, Bezod. James Wood for the record. The first slide we're going to talk about is cybersecurity and why does it matter. Cybersecurity is a business resilience and risk management function. It's not just an IT function. Cybersecurity protects the county operations, our critical systems, and our sensitive public data, and it also helps bolster public trust. Some examples of Some areas where the county is responsible for sensitive data is in HIPAA, PII, which is personal identifiable information, PCI when it relates to credit cards, and CJIS when it comes to criminal justice information. Recent investments have strengthened that foundation. We've recently rolled out things like multi-factor authentication, endpoint protection, SECURITY MONITORING, BACKUP RESILIENCE, WORKFORCE AWARENESS THROUGH PHISHING CAMPAIGNS, AND WE HAVE IMPLEMENTED AND UPGRADED OVER 100 FIREWALLS ACROSS THE COUNTY. THE WORKFORCE READINESS MATTERS, TOO. WE USE THINGS LIKE PHISHING CAMPAIGNS. OCTOBER IS CYBERSECURITY AWARENESS MONTH. WE HAVE AN INFORMATIONAL CAMPAIGN THAT GOES OUT. WE DO ANNUAL CYBERSECURITY TRAINING. department tabletop exercises to help employees prepare before we actually have an incident. In FY27, some of those areas of expansion include expanding our zero trust environment, automation, resilience, AI-assisted detection, compliance with CIS and NIST, and there's also an improved CISO role to help with those. Cybersecurity reduces risk, but no organization can actually eliminate risk. That is why the next part of our resilience is disaster recovery, making sure that county services can continue and recover when disruption happens. So disaster recovery protects essential services and helps the county recover quickly and responsibly. Disruptions are inevitable. It's our responsibility to be prepared. Disaster recovery ensures that the county services continue during unexpected events. The goal is to recover quickly, minimize those impacts, and maintain the public trust. Strong recovery capabilities are a key part of our organizational resilience and operational readiness. So the question becomes what does it look like in practice? The next slide explains how the disaster recovery plan actually works in the event of a disaster. It's designed to protect the most important services and communicate clearly and recover safely. We prioritize the services that matter most to our residents. The plan establishes clear roles, responsibilities, and communication. Recovery is focused on restoring services quickly and safely. The plan provides structure and coordination during disruptions. The plan only works if it's actually tested, updated, and understood. That is why our current work is focused on strengthening our plan through testing, exercises, documentation, training, and partner coordination. Disaster recovery is not a one-time document. It's a continuous improvement program. We test, train, and refine on an ongoing basis. We are modernizing technology to improve a speedy recovery and reliability. We're strengthening coordination with staff, vendors, and partners, and we continuously improve based on lessons learned from actual events. The takeaway is that cybersecurity and disaster recovery are part of the same resilient strategy. Prevent what we can, respond effectively when needed, and keep improving the county services so that we can remain dependable. And with that, I will turn it back over to Bizaad.

Thank you, gents. As you can see on this slide, what stands out the most is that our community has grown by over 24%. With that type of growth comes increased demand in services, especially in technology over the past few years. What's notable is that how the county has responded and how our staff, our dedicated staff, have taken on additional responsibilities over the years. through your fiscally responsible decision and policies, we have been able to address the growing demand for technology without having to add additional headcounts. In fact, if you look at the total number of county employees, we are the same place that we were back in 2008. Even in technology, where the demanding growth has been the most, we have tried to do with the same level of headcounts. In fact, we are about 12 to 13% lower than back in 2008. So how do we do that? I think that was a couple of questions that came up at previous meetings as well. How do we use technology strategically so that we don't have to rely only on the headcounts? This slide, I tried to kind of present how technology demand goes up over time and how current capabilities cannot go, you know, increase as much. It either stays status quo or it reduces, in our case. What that generates is what we call the technology gap. Technology gap is what we are trying to address as part of our planning process. It's made of people, processes, and technologies. So what we have done is we have developed a comprehensive technology plan to address two main questions. What should we focus on and how to do it to be more effective? So as part of that planning process back in 2022, we started building a comprehensive technology plan. And as part of that process, we wanted to make sure we do have a framework that we do not miss any piece of data that is important to the technology planning process. This slide shows that framework. From the top, we see the community expectations. that comes to the technology plan through the strategic priorities of the county. On the left side, we call it trends dimension, external influences and so forth. We have technology dimension at the bottom, which is what type of technology do we want to use to be more effective and efficient? And on the right is how do we execute projects to be not only aligned with county's priorities, but also be more effective? So we use that framework and we worked with a number of staff throughout the county. This was a four to six months process. We got feedback and we had 30 some sessions with different department staff. We included many of the staff from different groups, surveyed employees and so forth. As part of that process, we identified 15 high priority initiatives, as well as 55 major projects. Another key Factor in technology planning processes that making sure that what we do in technology is aligned with your priorities with the county's strategic objectives. Um, and that's the role of the technology plan. In fact. On this slide, I tried to kind of show you how we make sure that the alignment is in place on top. I have listed the 4 strategic objectives. Of our county's strategy plan. For the technology planning process, we identified six areas which we call technology plan business objectives. They're supposed to answer those two questions. What should we focus on and how should we do it, right? If you look at it, the first one is deliver an enhanced business experience, modernize technology infrastructure, enhance cybersecurity and business continuity, drive digital transformation and business process automation. Those are the focus areas for us what to focus on. And how do we do it is we decided to say that strategic business partnership is our intention. We want to be strategic business partner with our stakeholders. And through the enabling the organizational excellence, which is looking at our own processes, improve it, make sure we are effective and efficient. Under every business objective, we have a list of what we call the strategic actions. And under each strategy actions, we have projects. So if you look at the slide bottom up, you see that every project must line up with one of your priorities, one of the county's objectives. This is a screenshot of a database of technology projects that we created through the technology planning process, and we keep up to date every three months. On the left side, you see the technology plan business objective under county's strategic priorities. On the right, you see the list of projects with the timelines and so forth, just an example. I also thought that it's important for this group to kind of, I think that there might be a question, where do we stand with technology? About three years ago, we decided to put together what we called a data-driven scorecard, getting feedback from different stakeholders, different areas, to see where do we stand with every service that technology services provides. On the left, we have what we call service categories, such as enterprise applications, GIS, radio systems, and so forth. And to the right of that is lifecycle. For example, what is the refresh cycle for PCs, servers, data centers, and so forth? And how do we plan for each one of those service areas? Every year, we reach out to all the county employees and ask them questions about those key service areas. And that's the satisfaction survey that what we got for the 2026 fiscal year. So this is basically this is supposed to demonstrate our maturity level with our technology. Our technology plan gets updated every three years. Last year, when we decided to update that for 24 through 27 years, we added two key strategic actions. One was artificial intelligence, and the other one was data management program. As you all know, we have been playing with AI, and one of the first things that we learned was that how AI is dependent on the data. while a lot of organizations jumped on building AI applications and so forth, but they also experienced a lot of risks and a lot of issues, right? So we learned that we need to establish a comprehensive data management program. And because of that, as part of the strategic planning workshop a year, year and a half ago, we added one new initiative called data management program to the counties. strategic priorities and that's a two three year project that we are trying to get a handle around all of the data throughout the county we have so much data from sheriff's office every department has data that is sitting all over in the cloud or in our data centers and so forth This slide is supposed to showcase that a sustainable AI approach is only possible if we do have a strong data infrastructure. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Quinn Korpulek. Quinn is basically our regional services manager overseeing a couple of these initiatives.

Should I see a light there?

Yeah, it's very light though.

It turned on.

Try again.

How about now? Yeah, okay. Perfect. Hi, everybody. Quinn Korbulik for the record. Thanks, Bezod. So Bezod highlighted the fact that AI has been a huge catalyst for this data management program. But even without AI, we recognize that data is a foundational asset for much of what we do here at the county. And one of the best examples of why data and information management are important for the county is the community services infrastructure scorecard. Behind that scorecard is an asset management system and associated data about assets. So data about roads, facilities, sewer system, reclaimed water, etc. And these data are an authoritative single source of truth that have governance structure and processes built around them to ensure that the data are accurate and always up to date. So taking a step further, the community services team are using the data to drive decisions about resource allocation and funding and to use the data as a tool to communicate the health of our infrastructure using the infrastructure scorecard. So this for us is the baseline. Our data information management program is designed to enable all departments to get to the point where they can confidently make data informed decisions about resources, funding, policy, operations, et cetera, and to enable that next step, which could turn into predictive or prescriptive use of data and analytics, and to manage our data through its life cycle. So how are we going to do this? That was the slide I was just talking to, and this is the next slide. So we worked with a consultant about 12 months ago and with many, many county stakeholders to develop our three year data management strategy. And these are the four main goals of the strategy. At the top level, we're going to be building a strong and achievable data governance framework policy. And the most important part here is that we set up accountability structures for data stewardship in every department and manage our data as a strategic asset. Secondly, we're going to provide training programs and tools to enable the use of interpretation and analysis, really to build that data literacy within our staff. Moving to the third goal, and each one of these goals builds upon the other. When we have high data quality and clear data governance and we have staff who are empowered to utilize data, we can more effectively analyze that data to support evidence-based decision-making across the organization. Finally, we want to increase transparency and community engagement by proactively sharing data when appropriate internally and to the public. Now, this is something that we already do, but we can and should share a higher volume of data from a single location using our current and existing open data website. So as I mentioned earlier, we're talking about managing data as an asset. And with like any asset, like an air conditioner or a vehicle, data has a life cycle. And so as we begin to, and as we are achieving our data management goals, we will be able to manage, we will inherently manage our data through its data lifecycle. So, for example, if we're implementing strong data governance, we're going to be defining accountability to make sure that our data are accurate and stored securely. Our governance structure will also ensure that we archive and delete data when appropriate to help manage costs and mitigate risks. And eventually, when we have well-trained and data-literate staff, they will ensure that our data governance is followed and be able to focus on data analysis, data-informed decision-making, and using our data to communicate decisions internally and through data visualization. So in our data management strategy, each goal has a set of objectives underneath them. I'm not going to go over each one of them, and this is not a comprehensive list, but I do want to focus on one thing here, and that is the establishment of an AI and data governance framework. And one of our next steps going into the summer and fall is the finalization of that data and AI governance into a data and AI governance policy. So that's something that we'll be working on here in the near future and probably will come to this group for approval. So speaking of AI, We want to provide an update on what we've been doing, where we're going with the adoption of AI here in the county. So far we've explored a number of AI tools and use cases and adopted some tools such as Madison AI, which I think you're familiar with and that we helped develop. We also rolled out co-pilot chat to all county staff and we've developed Washington County Chat, which is our public facing chat assistant that will be part of the Washington County website and is expected to be rolled out later this summer. So now we're transitioning to a strategic and responsible implementation of AI. And we'll talk more about that in a bit. But part of that transition to responsible AI is the development of AI policy. And really, with a policy, we want to make sure that we do not expose the county to unnecessary risk related to cybersecurity or data compliance, and that we're not adopting tools that are making autonomous decisions without human interaction. So, I want to finish this slide up by highlighting another key achievement that we've established a data and AI center of excellence and this is a resource for employees and it's centralized for to be able to come to us and learn best practices around data and AI, find training resources and we can also help with developing solutions to data and AI problems. So, departments across the county are beginning to responsibly adopt AI tools to automate processes and 1 department that has shown leadership in the space is the assessor's office. So I'm going to hand this off to the Washington assessor Chris sermon to talk about what they're doing.

Testing testing. Okay. There we go. That's how you do it. Now, hey, thanks for a good afternoon. Thanks for thanks for having me. Thank you for the opportunity to share the story of our office and the technology initiatives that we've kind of taken place. Can I get the button, the clicker or have you click it or you're already on it?

Looks good. Tell me next slide.

Yeah. And so let's just start with our mission statement. Right. And a couple of key words that are in that statement to start it off is efficiently produced, right? And we've got accuracy and we're talking about transparency. And so those are some really key words that we look at in our office that we stand on. So, why this initiative? We all know why, right? Technology is here. We, like every other department, every other office, we've seen a loss of full-time employees of our staff. We've seen the county grow, just like we've been talking about here. So, not only have we lost staff, but we have this huge influx of workloads taking place, right? just as we're starting to bust at the seams, we're sitting there thinking, how are we gonna do this? Here comes AI. How are we gonna meet the goals and the responsibilities that we have of our office, whether it's at the county level, our office level, or at the state level? Well, we had to dive into it. We started looking at it and we started working with the various teams here at the county. And so we can just go to the next slide there. We have to become efficient. We have to do more with less. That's the big talk, right? And so that's what we're doing. We've been doing that, but we need to continue doing that. And so a couple of the... I just kind of want to work through some of the things that we've developed, our team. Hats off to them. And then, of course, TS working with our team and the collaboration in that. But just to name a few here, a SLAP AI program that we've developed. This allows us to... EFFICIENTLY STREAMLINE A PORTION OF OUR APPRAISAL PROCESS. AS WE GO THROUGH THAT, IT'S A TOOL THAT TRANSFORMS THE DATA AND PUTS IT INTO ACTUAL INSIGHTS FOR OUR APPRAISERS. IT SUMMARIZES, CALCULATES SOME COMPLEX THINGS FOR US, PRODUCES REPORTS. IT'S AN AUTOMATION TOOL THAT WE'RE USING. AND WHEN WE'RE DOING THAT, AS PART OF OUR ALLOCATION PROCESS, IT'S SAVING ABOUT 20% OF THE TIME. That's a big number right for that portion of that. Duty that we're doing personal property side of things. We've got a lot of these acronyms that we came up with. Right? I mean, that's kind of the fun part about doing this to be honest with you is poem and appraise kind of the 2 similar type things there, whereby we have. Business owners that supply us with declarations that come in, and these 2 programs, they go through it, they automated, they calculate what assets what they, they assign different depreciation rates to it. And ultimately, throughout that process, it just, it eliminates a lot of redundancy. manually written scripts, and it just streamlines a lot of that process for us and automates it. Pearl, you guys are familiar with it. And again, that's about 20%, maybe even 25% of time savings in regards to what that task and that duty is. It's a big deal. Perl, you're familiar with. We've talked about it a few different times now. I think it's just a large language access model, right? Whereby emails come in through this engine. It basically reads through what those emails are, what the context is. It summarizes what that is. It provides us with next steps, potentially even creates an automated response, right? So if we have a question that comes into one of our divisions, Summarizes it kicks out a response and so those are just a few of the things that we're doing. We go to the next slide. Please. Saving us a lot of time. that doesn't mean that we don't have work to do right because these workloads have grown so big so um but it does allow us to look at some other things so uh the challenges for us in our office at this time and and i've said this for a couple years now but i think for every convenience there's an equal and opposite inconvenience of technology right okay cool we've addressed this issue and this concern but now let's open the door to some other things that we have to go down the cost of time and resources. One, it's expensive. We all know how expensive this technology is, but by the time we research it, we develop it, we deploy it, we train on it, and we get all that done, and we work with the various teams and involve them, all of a sudden there's new technology, right? So we did all that, and here we are. And I just want to say that, you know, the conundrum that exists, like we really, we have foresight to implement a lot of new models to address a lot of new efficiencies in our office. But it's challenging to get there. And you've heard Azad talk about this with his team and everybody's team for this matter is the capacity and the time allowed to do it, right? So how do we get to efficiency if we don't have the time to get to that efficiency? So anyways, that's just the story of our office. So I appreciate you guys again for allowing me to kind of come here and talk about that. Back to Quinn, I guess.

Thanks, Chris. So I want to highlight one of the things that you just said, Chris, is in that you're utilizing some AI tools, but also just automating processes. And I think that's a big focus of... our data and information management program, along with our AI program, is that you don't always need AI. You can automate processes and you can become more efficient without incurring the cost of AI, without incurring the risk of AI or other tools. So that's, I think, a really important point here. So as far as going back to AI, as I mentioned earlier, we're transitioning now from AI explorers, early adopters, to really strategically implementing AI tools. And the top and bottom line here is that we need to adopt AI strategically and responsibly. So to that end, we're going to ensure that as we're looking at AI tools that we're adopting and choosing the highest impact projects, And involving staff, so that we can solve real business problems. And I think this is really the key here is because department staff know their businesses and so driven by those business problems that are kind of surface through these processes. Um, we're going to, we're going to hope to. Focus on redefining or redesigning business process with automation. Again, maybe not with AI, but potentially with AI and where appropriate utilize agentic AI, which is basically that can can act on behalf of a user. So, we're also encouraging AI adoption by asking county staff. to submit their ideas about how AI or automation can be used in their departments or across the county. And based on those submissions, we will focus our resources on the highest impact projects. So I want to finish here by circling back to our responsibility as technology services to ensure that AI is adopted in a way that minimizes risks but maximizes impact. and that our guidelines and policy will ensure that we're not relying on AI-based autonomous decisions and that there will always be a Washoe County employee between our AI-generated decision or content and the public. We want to make sure that there's always an employee there to check the work of the AI before we release it. And that is the end of those slides.

Thank you, Gwen. In closing this section of the workshop, I'd like to highlight that technology powers every service in Washoe County. Services that our community and staff rely on every day is only possible because of the technology foundation and those foundational elements. So keep that in mind as we think about investing in technology, where we're in technology we want to invest in, because it's expensive and it's a lot of work. With that, we'll be glad to answer any questions you may have.

Did you want to tease something up there, Dave? I was looking for a pause. I was helping you with a pause. One more slide?

All right. All right. So, you know, you heard an awful lot about kind of where we're headed with the technology, trying to minimize the risk and some of those other sorts of things. As you'll recall, back in December, we interviewed each of you, trying to understand kind of the strategy and a few other things. interviewed the other elected officials as well as the department heads. And some of the concern at the time was around, you know, this question at the beginning, you know, are there concerns of achieving more with less through strategic use of technology? Because in some instances, there are tools out there that while we want to have a human in the loop, there are some things that can be automated to the point where a human, you know, can overview, I think one of the examples is the technology in the assessor's office, but are there concerns from your perspective of going too far with technology? I think that's really what we're trying to understand here is how far do you want us really to go, at least with this first question, And some of those concerns of achieving more with less. Some of the comments, I went back and read some of those interview comments. I don't remember who they could be attributed to, but there's a real fear of taking the human out of some of these things. The comments with, oh, a person needs to answer the phone. We've been dealing with phone trees for an awful long time. You know, that's a technology that's out there. Are there concerns of that nature that you're all concerned with as we kind of try to develop this strategy of really where we're headed? Because as we all know, employees are expensive, but employees are also necessary for the job and the type of things we do. And then we'll get to the second question, which is really about prioritizing that technology. The technologies we've put into place so far are really internal looking, allowing our staff a better tool to assist them in their job so that they can be more responsive to the citizen. tiptoeing around the until we get the data right you know should we be forward facing and we're working through that with the website chat bot some of those other sorts of things but are there concerns that you have related to where we should be focusing our technology infrastructure to assist at least in your in your mind is setting the strategic direction of the community or the county so with that I'll open it up to any questions comments concerns guidance any questions

Commissioner Clark.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And I'd like to direct this first question to Quinn. I can't see your last name there. I can't pronounce it either. But one of my first requests is maybe we can just get on and off switches for our microphones so we'll know when they're on and when they're off because everybody who comes and presents with us and ourselves included can rarely tell when the microphone is activated. So that would be a request I would have. But I'd like to focus on, and I would ask these same questions to any elected or any department head, but we're lucky enough to have the assessor here today, and I'm going to focus on some of his issues. You know, we've lost 24% of the full-time employees in the recession, and those have never been replaced. Is that a correct statement from your... 25% loss of folks. Parcels have increased by 25% throughout the county. Is that correct? That's what you're stating here on your worksheet? That's correct. And the population's increased by 28%, and the reappraisal workload has increased by 80%. So again, you just happen to be here, but I would address this to anyone. Where is the breaking point? And the last, before you answer that is, and the last sentence that you had here was increased workloads versus less capacity to become efficient. So we've got questions about employee morale. We've got, what do you see, what do you see is happening? And another thing is, I think, let me throw this in so people understand, the technology, a lot of the technology you have is purchased by your special fund that you get from the state of Nevada. Is that correct? So a lot of this burden of increased productivity was borne out by your technology fund. Is that a fair statement? That's a fair statement.

Yes, so a couple things, right, with that that you went through here. Yeah, those are statistics that are there, right? It's a static number, but we're not a unique office in that regard. There's a lot of other offices or departments feeling that same pressure. That reappraisal workload, I noticed that it was 80% on the slide, but it's really 400%. We were picking up 80% more of the appraisal workload, but Whatever the case, to your last question or to the last statement there, that was just, that was, I was trying to get across, you know, one of the challenges, right, is that we don't have, we have the vision and we have employees that have the ability to build out models or programs and the capacities are tight, right, because the workloads are there. So we want to get to the efficiency, but we can't quite get there because we don't have the time to do it, right? And so... But to the point that you've made, yes, some of the technology, we've built out a lot of our own, whether it's AI or it's not, and we've worked with the teams. Some of it's purchased, right, for sure. Some of this, we do have a technology fund, and you can see as they've come through in some of our... your agendas, you know, those are big numbers tied to some of those technologies. And they certainly don't seem to stop going up in price every year.

Sure. But it's been my recollection that a lot of the other departments don't have access to the technology fund throughout their budgetary process. So the good news is you have that ability. The bad news is there's a point in time where everybody gets to the end of the line and And I just want to make sure that doesn't happen. And it's all based on the fact that, you know, 50% or more of the county's income comes right through your office to make its way here through real property and personal property appraisals and an assessment. When do you get to the end of the line here? What do you see happening? And, again, this is kind of a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the county employees and the rest of the departments. You just happen to be here today. But give us some predictions on that and give us your assessment on that.

Well, I really think that we had reached a technology – point where you know because again this goes back to 2008 2012 in our office and and not having the staff or in growing capacities um and i even came before this board i think kind of asking for some new positions potentially but then so right at the point that we're really busting at the seams i mean i said there's no way we can do this here comes ai right and AI changes that landscape, and I don't know, Mike, or Commissioner Clark, I'm sorry, if at this point in time I even have that answer for you, because we haven't, because of the deployment of the new technologies that we're having put in place, I see where the potential for the gains in that capacity exist. Now, that being said, That doesn't come without the cost of, again, training that employee, the duties changing. I mean, it causes disruption. For every convenience, there's an equal and opposite inconvenience. This is one of them, right? Whereby, okay, now we have this new model to do this new system. Well, do we have the person trained to do that, right? Or how does that role change? How does that, is it a reclassification? Is it just new training? There's all sorts of challenges that are tied to it, and we're right in the middle of it right now, so I don't have that specific answer for you at this point in time, but certainly, To your point, I mean, we've taken a lot of pride in being saying, okay, we've dealt with it with 63 employees for 15 years, right? As this county's really grown the way it has. Where does that leave us in the future? I don't have that answer yet because we're just we're experimenting with this new stuff, but there will be a day. I do believe that, you know. At some point in time, right, you might have to look at adding staff. I don't know when that is, though.

So it won't be a surprise when that happens. So another question then is, based on what you just said, is any... Is anyone escaping taxation? Is anyone not getting addressed properly? Are we leaving anything on the table by what's taking place in your office? That's a great question, Mike.

Absolutely. With some of these, you know, I talked about that. We have a job to do. So we saved 20% on the reappraisal of allocation neighborhoods. Well, that's just a small component to whatever we might be doing. But to your point, that has opened up a window for us to look at equity, equitability and fairness across all parcels. Right. And to your point on that. Yeah, we've been limited with regards to. whether it's performing an error review, right, which results in new funding, right, or getting quality classes correct and those kinds of things, those challenges that come with that. So there is absolutely opportunities out there for us to hone in on and become more qualitative and quantitative, right? And so that's where we're at right now. Those that you speak of that you mentioned, that does exist, right?

I wonder if you could prepare sometime in the future the cost analysis return on investment for employees that would help, you know, keep things from falling through the cracks and make sure nothing escapes taxation. Thank you.

Thank you. Vice Chair Garcia.

Thank you so much for the thorough presentation. I was writing down notes and trying to take it all in. The first meeting I had with you was about the comprehensive technology plan. I believe we chatted pretty extensively about that. So, you know, ACM Solero wants to kind of decide if we want to, you know, focus on internal service delivery or external service delivery. So I just had a quick question out of curiosity. When you did that technology plan back in 2022 and you identified the 15 high priorities and the 55 major projects, were those inward facing or externally facing projects?

That's a great question, actually.

And how did you prioritize those?

Okay, that's correct. So, if you recall, we had one slide that showed development of what we call those business objectives of technology, right? Focus areas, where do we want to focus on? And as part of that process, we tried to take in information from a few different areas from some of the IT advisory firms we worked with and so forth. We had risk assessment sessions. We talked to the departments. So we decided four focus areas. Enhancing citizens' experience. So definitely that's the highest priority for us in terms of focusing our technology, maybe direct or indirectly. Enhancing cybersecurity and business continuity is another focus area. Modernizing technology infrastructure is another one. And digital transformation and business process automation, those are our focus areas. While we are addressing both internal and external technology services in our technology plan, I think it's important to keep in mind that it's, I think we have to keep in mind that all of those areas are important to technology, whether we focus on it directly or indirectly. Rather look at when the request comes to us, keep that in mind that This is external facing, is that a higher priority versus internal facing? Now, another aspect of technology planning process is that we decided to say how to do it is through strategic business partnership. That simply means that if I'm able to address the needs for technology, let's say in sheriff's office, right? I have aligned my goals with that department goals, right? So indirectly, we are providing enhancing citizens experience by providing services to the sheriff's office. So indirectly, we are doing that. So that's what we try to do throughout the technology planning process.

Okay, so what I hear you saying is you went out, you gathered feedback from all the different departments and divisions, you brought it back, and it sounds like you balanced the internal with the external. Absolutely. Based on the priorities.

Yes.

Okay. So as we move forward, I didn't know we had an infrastructure scorecard for technology, which is cool. Thank you for sharing that with us today. Is there more of an emphasis on prioritizing things that we're scoring poorly on?

Absolutely. And that's the idea behind the scorecard. The scorecard, that meant to be a very high level for us to say, okay, for example, the areas that we have a D or C on, we should be focusing on and so forth. I think it's a good big picture for this group to kind of look at and say, maybe we should be focusing on these key areas. So in order to build that, we created a data-driven decision planning process. So for each one of those areas, life cycle planning and so forth, we had a number of different indicators that we kind of populated and it came up with that scorecard that is in front of you. But we use that to make sure, for example, you see that when it comes to voice services. A few years ago, we transitioned from in-house telephony system to a cloud-based one, Devonage. We have had challenges with that since that transition. So we are trying to kind of look at that and say, yes, next year, as part of the budgeting process, do we want to kind of consider looking at that again? So definitely that helps us make better decisions and focus on areas that need the most.

Okay. So whether they are internally facing or externally facing, I think, I mean. for me personally, focusing on the areas that we need to raise the grade on are important. But personally, I think it's a balance between the external and the internal. You know, like if I'm an adoptive parent and I'm trying to get help for my kid and I'm reaching out to the post-adoptive services and I get a robot and I'm in crisis, that's not going to sit well with me and it won't sit well with most people. And so we have to really look at those areas of the county where there's a higher tendency to be more stress or more angst or just this sense of urgency I think would be better met with a human maybe first if at all possible but it's going to be a balance because when you did this plan in 2022 think about how much has changed when you interviewed us six months ago think about how much has changed I mean I was just listening to a podcast this morning about the humanoids and all of the things that are coming to us in the next year or two. And so our built environment is going to even drastically change with automation and all of these new technologies. And so we're going to need to be very nimble. And it sounds like the infrastructure to shift gears is there. So being flexible is another, I would say, priority because it's going to change six months from today. And then there was one other thing. Oh, the hidden, I liked the analogy of the glacier, the iceberg model. And cybersecurity is one of those things that just, it's very concerning. And you don't really think about it until things go wrong, right? And it's like, if you've ever owned like chickens in your residence, you know, in your neighborhood, chickens will spend all day trying to find how to get out of the coop, right? They're just like poking their head in every single. And I feel like that, you know, large agencies like the county are constantly under attack. They're trying to find ways to, you know, get us. And I was really relieved to see that we have a good rating on our cybersecurity, but it's As there is a national and international race for intelligence, as we're seeing, AI is beyond what we even understand or comprehend right now. We're going to have to keep our eye on the ball with cybersecurity because that's going to continue to evolve. So while we think we're doing okay in it now, six months from now, we can be behind the eight ball. So I guess the moral of the story is we should probably have this discussion every six months would be more timely because we're just in that stage in American history where it's just rapidly changing. So I appreciate your time to let us know where you're at right now and letting us weigh in on, I think, what our constituents need and are requesting for us. But I just think it needs to be a balance of internal and external so that we're strong.

Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you. I'll just add a couple things just to piggyback off of a couple things that have already been said. But I see the correlation, quite frankly, between the internal and external. And I think the examples the assessor gave in terms of that balance, because as you improve, and we'll use external, as you improve the external ability and streamline and give citizens more flexibility flexibility and access and being able to get answers quickly and promptly that frees up staff but then staff is actually moving on additional tools that can so there's this almost um those of you that have drive a stick shift you know like there's this balance between the clutch and you know at times and and the gas and i feel like um that correlation is is the balance and then i i had wrote down that we're really not playing a game of checkers we're playing a game of chess And that's a really important thing, I think, from a technological standpoint that we need to look at, and you are looking at. And I guess I'm going to do a couple things. One, thank you, county manager, for looking at having a chief information security officer in our budget. Because it speaks to the importance of cybersecurity, and it's not just what we think or we hear. It is... inevitable. It is going to happen. It's not when, I mean not if, it's when. And so I think being proactive is really, really important and it'll be interesting to see and working with your team how that all, you know, gets matriculated into various things. But we are at an inflection point, and I think I'm going to balance something that isn't asked but still within the framework of what you're asking. You know, one of the things as we move and the skill set improves, I think we need to look from an HR standpoint as well, not only the internal training to train up and to also look at getting feedback, but looking at as we may have different skill sets that need to be looked at with the county, and it's not the same old way of doing things. It's just not. That's just the nature. We're all in that, even in our individual lives. So I think that we need to really keep our eye on the ball with, I don't think necessarily HR first thinks of talking to technology per se, but I could be wrong. But I do think that that's an important point. But I do have a question. The Wall Street Journal just recently announced IBM and Red Hat investing in a $5 billion, and that is a B, to establish a new model for open source software. The cost of technology is expensive. We think employees are expensive. The cost of technology is expensive. So I am wondering what you may see, not necessarily, I don't know how to use long-term because long-term could be today, but what is the plan to look at what they're calling Project Lightwell? And you're probably aware of it because you're in this field, but the global workforce that they're looking at deploying is 20,000 engineers. And you know what it's all for? Open source, and so it's going to, I think, we are going to see an inflection point of changing the dynamic of how software is looked at, licensing is looked at, open source, and I'm wondering what you might be looking at in that topic, in that regard. Just curious.

Thank you for the question. It's a very important question. So in Washoe County, one thing we did as part of the technology planning process, one thing that we established was that do we want to custom develop stuff? Do we want to use open source software or not, right? And there are risks associated with every decision that we make, right? When it comes to purchasing a piece of software, the risk is enormous. budget challenges and so forth, right? And with open source, there might be cybersecurity risks, right? And not having, getting updates all the time. Now in Washoe County in government, we have to follow certain rules as it relates to DOJ requirements, PCI and some of those HIPAA requirements. For that, we decided that we stick with off-the-shelf product as much as possible because of two things. First of all, we know that it's a lot more expensive. It's very expensive to maintain that type of environment. And we are always at the mercy of the vendor because of it. But the advantage of that model is that They have staff that constantly providing updates when the cyber security threat is out there. These companies, they have to update their software and send it to us, right? Now, if we go with an open source model, then we are at the mercy of our own staff for a lot of stuff. So that was the driving decision behind that. looking at the risk when it comes to open source. We are also looking at developing a strategy for in-house development versus, you know, trying to stay with the off-the-shelf products wherever possible. So, I don't know if I answered your question.

No, you did, but I do think that it is here. It is here. And so we're not in the business and we're in the customer service business. And I believe that there's always a balance. So we don't have to be the first movers, right? The first movers are the ones who... We usually are a different entity than a government entity. But the reality is it's here. And that's all I was curious is where do you see that? Because long-term is around the corner. There's no long-term. It's around the corner. And I always will just, I'll leave it with this. When you buy a printer, it's not the printer that's expensive. Guess what's expensive?

The ink.

The ink. Why? Because that's the same thing with software applications. So purchasing, oh, well, here's your enterprise cost for 3,000 people. Oh, by the way, there's this update. There's security update. There's another security update. There's another security update. And so I think the data-driven ability to look at what that balance is is well-equipped in your office. But I'm just bringing it up also because I don't think people think about that. I think about it, probably more than I should, but I do think about it. And then lastly, I do think that you hadn't hit on EDRM, but I do think we, in terms of whether it's the minutes or whether it's various other, I'll use the term. data heavy information that can be automated. So I think that's going, we're going to see a balance of that too coming out. I'm sure if not already seeing it. Um, and, and also I believe honestly how appreciative you said it three times and maybe even more on not being autonomous and just letting the data just fly. And that's really, really important. You know, there was a time when everybody was afraid that data, We weren't even going to have workers. It was almost like instead of a planet of the apes, it would be a planet of the robots, and we would be at the mercy. Although I'm going to probably not be alive when it does happen. It probably will happen. But the point is that... We have to have human involvement. We have to. And I'll leave you with this. There's a really famous gentleman, and unfortunately I'll have to get you his name, who hated the word, and this was in the 1950s, who predicted AI and hated the word that they called it intelligence, because that means you have a conscience. And I thought that was a really interesting thing to share in closing. But thank you for all of your hard work. Thanks for adopting the Center for Internet Security, which is a statutory requirement in NRS 603A. And also really understanding that we are at an inflection point, and we... really, I think, have to be a supportive piece, whether it's to the assessor's office and looking at the balance of the human, but we also need the human. But also what those things are that you need from us, even on policies, as you've noted that we'll be seeing a policy coming back. And I think data governance is going to be a term we'll all be using on a regular basis. And so we look forward to when the new CISO comes and getting an update. And then I'll just... I'm just curious myself not to add additional workload, but it would be really interesting to see what the costs are for technology. I'm talking about just even software. What are the costs to the county of software subscription services? Because as an example, and I know it sounds like I'm pushing open source, and I kind of am, because I know we've had this conversation before, but you know Microsoft even uses open source. They... There are major, major companies. I better retract that. I'm just saying there are major companies that use open source. Now, yes, there's a balance of the technology, but the cost of purchasing ink all the time is the balance I think we have to look at, both in that internal and external. I think it'll be exciting. I think we also have a responsibility in closing to let the public know, too, we just can't expect... folks to go on. I think that we have to have kind of an intuitive process when we're looking at automating things, like the Washoe checkbook, right? And looking at how we can help people drive that bus that may not be so familiar with driving. So whether it's the public records request, which I know takes additional but there could be things that we could really automate, like permitting. Permitting is another thing that I think could streamline costs, and we could actually have that turnaround time. So it'll be interesting to get an update from everybody on where we're at. from where we're at, at least now, where we're at maybe in six months, where we're at in a year, especially with budget constraints being the way they are. So if there aren't any other comments, I'll just say thank you so much to everyone for all of your hard work. And is there an intellectual property on that stuff that you developed, I hope? We have some attorneys at Washoe County, my friend,

You know, I brought that up in the past, and I've spoke with Dave about that, because you're absolutely right. There's value to that, 100%. I mean, it's stuff that's super valuable from an intellectual standpoint, for sure.

We need IP. We need folks looking at IP. Maybe we could actually license it to the state.

All the other counties, other counties, I mean, yeah.

Huge opportunity, I think, Madison AI, and kudos to Online Strategy and to ACM Solero for coming up with a brilliant idea. You guys were way ahead of your time, but I hope we're not losing on the IP piece. Protect, protect, protect. Thank you so much. I guess we'll close that out and give you a moment to transition.

We're gonna take a moment to switch out the players up here. Some of us will stay where the music comes new ones will come in a little bit of digital information delivery.

Yay. You're welcome. All right, we're going to open up the workshop again, and I'm going to turn this over, I believe, to ACM Solero.

Yeah, to me again. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Dave Solero, Assistant County Manager. Today we've got Tammy Cummings, our Digital Communications and Accessibility Manager. Again, our assessor, Chris Sarman, and an IT manager, Kobe Harkins. with us today to talk through really our digital information delivery. So this is website, those types of things. And so, you know, we really want to make sure that you understand kind of the work we've put into digital accessibility, kind of our future model of website and, you know, some of those things you talk about. changes. I joke with this group all the time. It's like, someday we won't have to make pretty websites. AI will just mine some data that we put into a hole somewhere. And, you know, I mean, you start to see that on your phones right now, right? You ask Google a question and it gives you a synopsis. You don't even have to necessarily go to the website unless you want more information. And then, you know, we've got a department example of utilization, kind of what the website, how do we get there. And then we'll talk a little bit about that, you know, centralized versus maybe not centralized web governance. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tammy Cummings. Great.

Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. So first of all, for the record, my name is Tammy Cummings, and I am the Digital Communications and Accessibility Manager here at Washoe County. And I want to say thank you so much for allowing us to be before you today to talk to you about this. It's kind of exciting for us. And I'm going to start by talking about front doors. For decades, the door to Washoe County government has always been our buildings and our service counters and our telephones. But now today, for most of our residents, that front door is our website. Last year alone, forwarded on over, WashoeCounty.gov website, just that website, received approximately 4.7 million unique visits. That's roughly an average of 13,000 resident interactions every single day. That number represents real people that are trying to vote, that are trying to find their lost pet, that are participating in public meetings, reserve parks, they get married, they're applying for business licenses or getting a birth certificate. The reality is this, our website is no longer simply just a communications tool. It is one of the most important ways that we deliver public service to our constituents. So which brings us to an important shift in how we think about public service. If our website is one of the most primary ways residents access county government, then digital access really isn't about technology and it isn't about website or information sharing. It's really about service. So digital accessibility means making sure every single resident, not most residents, not as many residents as we possibly can, every resident has access to information, programs, and services in an equally effective way. So for example, a senior resident with declining vision, we have quite a few of them out there, they're trying to find out where to vote. or they're requesting accessible voting support, and they're going to our website. If it was not built correctly, and I'm here to tell you it is, our registrar of voters has worked very, very hard to make sure their site is accessible, but if the forms were not labeled properly, the buttons couldn't be read by assistive technology, or information is buried inside notoriously inaccessible PDFs, the resident would struggle with critical election information. And in that moment, that person's struggles isn't about the website. It's about their civic participation. So from paying taxes to applying for permits, from finding senior service food support to receiving emergency alerts on flood or wildfires, residents increasingly experience their government through their screens, whether it's their computer, their tablet, or their telephone. Digital access is no longer a convenience. It is how most residents experience their government, across services and navigate some of the most important moments in their life. The Department of Justice recognized this shift when it issued a new digital accessibility requirement back in 2024, through the American with Disabilities Act. And they required compliance of over 50 very detailed what they call success criteria that had to be completed by April of 2026. But I'm really excited to tell you, I'm gonna forward this on to the next slide, that we already had gotten a head start. Back in 2023, even before the DOJ came out with the ruling, we began building a long-term digital accessibility program grounded in the simple idea that every single resident should have equal access to county services and information. So our goal wasn't just necessarily about compliance, it was about public access for all. Residents getting what they need when they need it. So I'm really proud to say that Washoe County has met that initial DOJ deadline, which has subsequently been extended to April of 2027. And we did it because of an extraordinary amount of work across this organization. This is certainly not the work of just one team. Hundreds of employees helped make this happen. And I also need to do a shout out to Beth Todd's Business Solutions TS team, who are also instrumental in those efforts. Our digital accessibility team conducted an independent accessibility audit, completed advanced web accessibility administration training. We logged in literally hundreds of hours over the course of weeks to learn what it was like to have a digitally accessible website. We built a countywide digital accessibility plan and implemented dozens of tools and training opportunities to help remediate I'm not kidding you, literally tens of thousands of very complicated accessibility issues across our websites and our apps. But of course, our greatest asset through all of this has always been our county staff. So we were talking earlier, right, about the difference between AI. Well, here's a perfect example of how staff rallied and did the work. Employees across departments painstakingly reviewed and improved their web pages to make sure the information was accessible to residents. And because of this work, Washoe County is now recognized as one of the national leaders in digital accessibility. Our team was invited to share best practices with governments across the country, and most recently, the National Association of Counties recognized Washoe County as one of three counties that they recommend following for digital accessibility practices. And that's the good news. The work is not one and done, though. An accessible website is something we consistently have to maintain and not something, frankly, we will ever finish. The work will never be done. But our success had highlighted a pretty significant structural challenge through all of this. Today, Washoe County operates under a highly decentralized web model with over 150 content editors across our departments adding content to our website daily. That model worked really well when the website functioned more as a digital brochure. But today, our website is our primary service delivery platform. And I'm going to say that again. It is our primary service delivery platform. So when something becomes that important, governance really matters. One of our biggest challenges moving forward is content management. And I know Behzad and his team talked about that at great length, right? The data management portion of it is just critical. It's the information and content that we provide the public each and every day on our web pages. And Washoe County currently maintains over 6,000 web pages just on the WashoeCounty.gov website alone. Over time, through employee turnover, through varying levels of web expertise by the content editors, along with continual content accumulation, our website has experienced a few challenges. Some information is outdated, some is duplicative, some exists in unpublished areas that staff understandably assume that residents can't access, but unfortunately scanners and search tools often can. National best practice though increasingly points to a centralized web administration model. Departments would still have complete control over their content, but what changes is how that information is managed. A centralized approach creates stronger oversight, quality assurance, more direct accessibility support, and content governance, helping us make sure that our information is accurate, current, accessible, and really easy for our residents to find. But we also need to be realistic. A mature, centralized model requires dedicated staffing, and we recognize that takes both time and considerable resources. Rather than waiting, we have begun what we call Web Administration Lite. In practical terms, what this means is that we're beginning to build guardrails using the resources that we currently have today. Communications and technology services are partnering to make sure our digital experience is much more user-friendly. Together with the technology services team, Beth Todd's team in particular, we're working on several initiatives, including exploring AI-powered website search, and I think that was alluded to earlier. Resident expectations are really changing quickly. Increasingly, people aren't really browsing websites like they used to. They're asking questions and expecting immediate answers through AI solutions. In fact, almost half of our residents prefer AI-powered overviews over reviewing or searching our website. And that means our information has to be accurate and structured and trustworthy because, unfortunately, AI is only as good as the information we provide, and we just discussed this minutes ago. Data hygiene is critical. We want our residents to get the right answers the first time with a very consistent county experience. We're also asking departments to conduct deep content reviews, eliminating outdated pages, reducing duplication, and making content clear and easier to understand without confusing and complicated jargon. And again, that's one of those 50 success criteria that the DOJ has handed over to us. It's not where we ultimately hope to be, but it's an important start. And this isn't simply about our websites. It's just about resident access, public trust, and really how we modernize service delivery responsibly. The encouraging part, though, is that we're already making meaningful progress. An example, of course, is our assessor's office, and we're going to be talking about that shortly, who has been really a model in site review. They have thoughtfully reviewed their materials. They've reduced unnecessary content and created a much more cleaner resident experience. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Assessor Chris Sarman to share more about his approach.

Thank you, Tammy. You know, first, thank you for the recognition. I think that means a lot. It doesn't happen without the staff that you mentioned, right, the human element to that. So it doesn't happen without a team and a framework and a vision, which you guys put forward in your teams as far as, you know, the collaboration on what digital accessibility looks like. So thank you for that push. Okay, good. You got the slide up there. You know, our priority and why is, of course, just that, right? Meeting the goals and expectations, the requirements, but also just providing excellent public service, right? And when you compound that or combine that with the thoughts of efficiencies for ourselves or our users or whoever that might be, you know, it starts to add up. It becomes pretty clear that our data is valuable when we start to look at the number of users that come to our website. I mean, I think you threw up the 4.7 million, and I don't know if we're 30% of that or not, but we're a big number in that, and that data is valuable, and we understand that. It became a priority of ours, of course, to work with you guys and to make sure that that happens. So, again, thank you for the recognition. The goal is simple, really. For us, it's efficiency through simplicity. How do we make this the best user experience possible? And that's just a simple thing. Easy to find, easy to understand, and it's accurate and it's accessible. It's really that simple, right? A lot of it goes into that, that simple equation. But if we can go to the next slide. One of the things that we had to do, of course, we looked at the demand of that website. Again, we talked about the number of unique visits to our website. It's a lot. Who is that person? It's everybody. I mean, it is everybody. It's whether people that are from our own county or the state or across the country, even internationally, we have hits. So it's all sorts of different information all the time coming through our website, looking for the data that we've already defined as valuable. You know, what is that, you know, what's the guide to that, what helped guide us in that commitment, right? So as we evaluated the standards, we might be on, yeah, we're good right there. So as we evaluated the standards, looking at levels A's and 2's, and I'm not going to get into the details of what that looks like, but making the changes was, as you had already mentioned, some things changed. with that, but improving the labels and the headings, just color changes, contrast, accessing those PDFs, online forms, the links, right, that might have been broken, what information's needed, not needed, what's changed, that sort of thing. So our goal is to meet that with 100% compliance, and I think we've done that. So again, thank you for that recognition. Next slide. The result, of course, is the public loves our website. I mean, I can't go anywhere in this community without somebody telling me how much they love our website, right? And don't change it. Don't ever change it. Of course, change is always inevitable, but they absolutely do tell us that all the time. They love it. So we get a lot of positive responses from that. I think moving forward, obviously, we have to balance the transparency with the accessibility, keeping it simple again. improving that efficiency, right. And working with the collaboration and the great teamwork that we have here, I think of the county is important. So I think we're on a path to a winning solution. You noted that's always going to be changing. And we're, we're always adaptable of course, and we have to be right. And it, this whole discussion of technology it's moving so fast that I mean it's it's been noted before but you know at some point in time everybody wants the answer from this phone right it's a one-time question and it's not even typing it's answering it or whatever it might be but we've got to make sure that that data is good it's clean it's accessible and it's accurate so anyways I'll leave it at that and coming back to Kobe all right can you hear me

So Kobe Harkins, for the record, with Technology Services. Thank you for letting me present today. I'm really kind of supporting Tammy and Chris with all they're doing and what I'm going to share. And I want to start with this first slide. I used AI and I had it search our 6,000 pages to kind of see the unique services that are available to citizens. So when you look at this slide, you'll see the different numbers. For instance, like user accounts, there's 12. There was 12 pages where an actual user citizen of Guasha County goes in and puts a user account information and accesses something. So there's all kinds of complexity in our websites, from interactive mapping, there's online payments, of course, and everybody's done that, registering for public meetings, that kind of stuff. One of the latest great things is the translation services, which I see going on over there. So we have a lot of complex activity going on. So let's get back to the theme that Tammy had. So our current model, she mentioned 152 content editors. These folks do a great job. A lot of them have other jobs. Some of them, to be honest with you, probably want to be doing their other job. And then we have some others who love content editing. They do a great job. Like, for instance, Chris mentioned their website. And it's awesome, right? But we're kind of all over the place with 24 departments. And so that's a really hard thing to manage. It's hard for coordinating stuff with Tammy's team. And so that can impact the experience our citizens have here in the county. It also, with the complexity of the websites, is adding security risk with all these different ways you can interact. And I'm going to get into that a little bit more. But also, everybody's talked about it. Things are going to change. New services get added and all that. Being able to scale these sites and change with the times can be difficult under the current model. Sometimes you can go to sites and you get this information here. Maybe it's a little different there. That's another thing. Back to Quinn and data governance. And just basically consistency in the sites can vary. So that's an issue right now that we're currently seeing. So if we change that, say we go to centralized model, centralized team, a team that works closely with Chris's team, and it's a team that Chris's team can use to help them improve their sites, we get all kinds of benefits. A big one is we always want to update our folks in the county as quickly as we can with the most important information. Sometimes that can lag a little bit if we're disorganized and so that's an important thing. Making sure we're not duplicating data. Of course it's great what Tammy's doing with accessibility and I think that's the first sign of an organized centralized model where you start seeing those kind of things. Just basic things in our websites like navigation tools and that kind of being the same. That can be confusing when you go from one site to another and it's different. And we don't want to take people's creativity away from them and their sites, but sometimes we have to look at what the people in the county really need in order to actively and successfully look at our data. Then sites get old. We need to update stuff. Pages get old. Question comes, why is this page even exist? We need to be able to manage that more efficiently. And then of course this guy, everything's going mobile and I think you're already seeing it, we're seeing more applications with mobile and that's gonna grow and we need to be smart about that and be able to handle that technology. So I am going to be the downer here and shift to security. So these are fun examples. I'm not going to go into them all and let you read. They're quite entertaining, some of the reading. And I am going to pick on AI. Sorry, guys, for that, because these are all AI examples. But the bad guys are definitely looking at AI. Hey, how can I use AI against folks? And this is what James Wood's team is always looking at with cybersecurity is these kind of situations and how our own technology can be used against us. One big one which was in the news quite a bit and it's the one that we talk to employees about here a lot is the Samsung issue where their employees weren't thinking and they started just loading information, important information into the chat bot and it got exposed to the world and that's something we're always trying to educate employees here at the county. We have CJIS, we have HIPAA, all that stuff. Do not, be careful, do not do that stuff. And then I wanted to hit another one, web crawlers. This is something recent that the cybersecurity team working with the Recorder's Office had to look at. The recorders detected that records were being scraped off the website, and how can we stop doing that? And so the cybersecurity team played around with technology and found ways to block those kind of things, and that'll have some impact on other things in the future where we want to prevent that. So these are the kind of things in the real world that we're encountering. AI tools are great, great value, but there is more risk with AI coming, and so we've got to be careful of that. All right. So improved web security, that's Tammy's team working with cybersecurity and working with departments in a unified fashion, making sure that we're doing things to where we can keep things secure but still give value to our citizens. So we can get a lot of improvement by doing that. You know, policies across the board that apply to websites, the same standards, reducing access to people that are actually doing the work. so that it keeps our security tight, reducing our attack surfaces. And then of course, with websites, there's always third party components. So always keeping that stuff up to date, that's always a continuing ongoing task constantly to make sure that there's no back doors into stuff. So that is the value of going to a centralized type model for websites. So that is gonna lead me to this guy, which is really my final slide, the future of what's coming with digital services. And they're all over the place, and I'm happy to say, gee, Washoe County is hitting a lot of these. I mean, we've been doing interactive mapping for a long time. You know, we have the, I can't remember the name of it, it's the 911 platform where we alert people about events. We have, you know, They talked about AI chat bots coming to our websites this summer and so forth. So a lot of these things other governments are looking at. These are the things we're already looking at, which is good. And I see other things that you guys are probably gonna have to think about in the future, things like unified citizen portals and citizen participation platforms. And even the idea of like some places are looking like each resident in the county has their own unique ID and they plug that in and they go in and see all their information. And that's actually been around for a while. There's even some small countries out there that their whole population are set up that way. They even vote through that kind of system. I'm not saying we do that, but I'm just saying those kind of technologies have been looked at. But I want to end this with saying really back to Dave's remark, this is the thing, the factor we really got to think about. And Tammy told me I have to do it I'm not supposed to do live demos, but I'm going to try it anyway, so it could fail, so don't, it's her fault. So anyways, I was watching my teen kids and all their friends, and that's how they do everything. They go to their phone and they talk to Suri or whoever, and then they ask the question, so let me ask the question. How do I license my dog in Washoe County? And then it's going to think. Hopefully it worked. It's thinking. I got a slow AI. Okay. This is so more successful.

To license your dog in Washoe County, you need a rabies vaccination certificate and to confirm if your dog is spayed or neutered, which affects the fee. Dogs four months or older must be licensed. You can apply online through DocuPet, in person at Washoe County Animal Services in Reno, or by mail. Fees range from $8 to $30 per year, depending on space status and duration. And unlicensed dogs can face fines. If you need help, you can contact them at 775-353-890.

So then like for folks like me, it has little links where I can go in and read deeper or it can take me to where I need to do my permit and all that. And honestly, this is, people are gonna decide their own AI that they wanna use and then they're gonna come to our sites. And so that goes back to all the stuff you've heard in the first session, the second session. What's our technology foundation? Are we good? Are we governing our data well? Managing it well? Cyber security, make sure everything's secure will really impact this kind of interaction with Washoe County. And that's all I have for you.

Can you do it in Spanish?

I believe so. I've been trying to do it in Tagalog because that's my wife's language. Okay, enough, enough. Stop.

You're done.

Any questions? Go ahead. No, just we go one slide further and then we can talk through a few things with the board here. related to this topic. And so provided this information, I think, to everyone on Friday, the community as well. But, you know, really trying to understand and gauge your thoughts around a couple of things. One, what is the experience that you really want a residence to have when accessing our county information online? And then what future technologies are you hearing about that we should be aware of you know, further than what Kobe just explained to us. Because that's, I do think that that is the way a lot of these things are going to go. But are there things that you're hearing from your citizens, your constituents, that we should maybe be aware of as we look forward to kind of how we're providing those services? So with that, I'll turn it back over to the board.

Does anybody have any questions? Commissioner Clark? Vice Chair Garcia?

So with the passing of AB 266, the language access, all of that that started several years ago, that was an unfunded mandate for us and that was your team that handled that, correct?

We worked in concert with Elizabeth Jordan and her group, yeah. Okay.

And in a similar light, when the U.S. DOJ gave you the mandate, that was unfunded as well? Correct, yes. Okay. So when you talk about the centralized model and team, are those existing positions that would then be allocated or are you looking for, you would need to bring on new people to do the centralized model?

There's so many different variations of that and we're looking at, like we said, we're talking about our sort of web administration lighting in terms of what staff that we currently have. But other models could incorporate a web administration manager or a web governance process. And I'll use UNR as an example. They have a team of, I think, eight or nine staff where all of the information is funneled through them. They're looking at the, um, they're looking at accessibility standards. They're reviewing the material. It becomes out in one voice. Um, it's vetted through each department. There's, there's, so there's a myriad of different options that are available in that centralized model. But the idea is that, um, it's vetted and it's vetted very carefully. So that way it meets specific policy standards.

Thank you. And I should have started by congratulating you on the national recognition. I had no idea. Yeah. And you can probably speak to it a lot more.

I present. I mean, yeah. But go ahead.

Yeah, I think. But yeah, congratulations. And then in terms of your question, Dave, on the what constituents say, you know, I've heard a lot of positive feedback about like the city of Sparks, their their app. The Sheriff's Office, a lot of people don't know that our Sheriff's Office app is really cool. You can point to an illegal dump site. It drops the GPS coordinates in there, and it goes straight to the work crew coordinator. And I think we have some of those things that are really neat already. We just maybe need to do a better job of telling that story. But I'm going to be looking now at the other jurisdictions as I mosey around different websites. I think the state is probably not the place to go. But I'll look at the city of Reno. Okay. City of Sparks and then other counties in the state of Nevada and beyond. But thank you for piquing my interest in that. I think that'll be neat to kind of see what other counties are doing as well. And to our assessor, you have been at the forefront of so many innovative practices, and I think that that shows true leadership, your willingness to just take on these creative ventures. And you don't know how they're always going to shake out, but it's really shown and paid dividends. So congratulations on that.

We really have an excellent team and staff that helps with that, so I just want to give accolades where it's due.

I have to give you like a tagline, the assessor's office, a new horizon never been visited before, like a Star Trek thing. We'll come up with something. I'm going to work on it. I'll text you. I have a couple things, so I want to really make this big deal a big deal. I don't know if you know this, but there are 3,069 counties in the United States of America And to be awarded one of the prestigious awards at the NACO conference was an honor. And so that is not anything but it is a big deal. So thank you to everyone who really is a part of that. And so I hope that we can continue. I think the assessor, they must have an award or something for technology in the assessor's office, I don't know. But you were a part of that, and I want to recognize that you were a part of that award, and so I want to make sure people know that as well. So maybe we should have a certificate proclamation for the assessor's certificate day or something, appreciation day. But I do have a couple things I'd want to add to the questions that have been asked for us to participate in. One, Vice Chair Garcia, you might find it interesting at the City of Sparks to have an app, if there's a light out, you just put, yeah, you've seen it, right? So it is interesting that other jurisdictions have embraced this, and I'm not saying Washoe County isn't at that par, but it is interesting that something simple as citizens reporting a light out can actually be such a proactive way of addressing safety issues and anything else related to that. But I do think that one thing that hasn't been spoke about that I'll just throw out and maybe it's already been thought about, it just wasn't brought up, is that as we're compiling all of this data, And we're compiling. It's almost like you don't know what you don't know. There's so much data. And I feel that if you don't know what you don't know and you're asked as a department, for instance, what do you need? It's almost like you don't know how to answer that. You don't know what you need because you may not know. And I wonder if there isn't an opportunity to look at what information... for those similar departments is already being extrapolated in other jurisdictions or calling NACO, for instance, and talking to the technology team and seeing if there are some things that are already being done that you haven't thought about. And I wonder, because it's a mass, it can really just be mind-boggling in terms of the amount of data that's extrapolated and then how to use it. And then I also think, to that you don't know what you don't know point, is that I also believe that giving the training on how we can analyze that data in order to make leadership decisions is really, really important. And I think that investment is well worth it. So, again, everyone's skill set is different. Everyone's brain's different talent and experience. that may not be something that is within your wheelhouse and I think that we should not just make an assumption that people can leap there. So I wanted to bring up that data governance extrapolation, looking at best practices and the training that goes along with it in order to make data-driven decisions might be something that is important. And then I do know, because I participate in the trainings that you provide, for instance, on cybersecurity as an example, and even the recent, which isn't really that recent, where bots are being used to go in and create what looks like, so I could say, DSolero at WashoeCounty.gov, and you think you're speaking with Assistant County Manager Solero, and he is in a position where he might be asking you something that is, critical information, and the next thing you know, it's not him. So I think we have to also take some responsibility as being part of the county in understanding And, you know, maybe we could have a secret question or something for you. I don't know. But I'm just saying that I do think we have to think if something sounds really fishy, it usually is. It usually is fishy. Don't click on the link. Hey, can you click on this link? The next thing you know, boom, TS staff is a little busy in the cybersecurity world. Did you have a secret question you'd like to share?

No, but I do need some gift cards, please.

Oh, okay. So if you get an email from D Solero at Washoe County, um, you know, he said it here. Um, the other thing that I'll add is I do think on the accessibility and thank you for all of your hard work and being so forward thinking and not waiting for the DOJ, even though they've given, given an extension to 2027, but it's still overwhelming. There are 24 departments here for over 3000 employees, a lot of different functions. And I do think when you go on, it is, um, there's just a lot to navigate. And so I can understand why people are like, don't change anything. But I do think that, I wonder if there's a way to actually be able to extrapolate where those barriers are, because usually you're not able to do that. So if someone's clicking, 20 times to get to XYZ department, that information is critical. Let's say 20 times is the average, but what if it's now looking at 50? There are 50 clicks to get to what would be, I would call, something that is a simple answer. What comes along with those 50 clicks? Frustration. And that human element. And so I wonder if we are doing that. You were asking for us to be thinking out of the box. I'm trying to think out of the box. In terms of using that, which is already accessible. You can grab that data. That's not anything that has to be created. And be more forward thinking on that piece. And so I'm just offering that as a suggestion to everyone. to follow the rules that have been laid out here. I'm a rule follower and I follow the law. This isn't legal, but I follow the rules. In terms of future technologies, I don't know. I've already shared some of the things with the previous part of this workshop with AI and where things are going. And so I think, I do think that The feedback from the community is the essential piece in order for us to figure out Instead of us figuring out what they need, they need to let us know what they need. And I think that's the piece that they may also not know exactly what they're looking for, but I think that there's commonalities that we can also grab. I think we can get that. And it's usually when you're looking for it at that moment, right? You're not proactively thinking something came up, but if you see patterns, those might be some things to think about automating and developing. So I wanted to throw that out. And lastly, I use the website a lot. I use a lot of the resources that are within the county, so thank everybody for doing such a great job. But I do think thinking about cross-pollination is important and being forward on that. So for instance, if I'm going to the assessor's office, and maybe there is, maybe I shouldn't use this because I think there is, but I'm going to. So I go to the assessor's office and I'm looking at a parcel or I'm looking at my property or whatever. If you're wanting to go to that map, it should automatically, through AI, give you that option. So in other words, cross-pollination, when you're visiting those pages, could actually be a part of that experience, where AI is like, oh, you're looking at this? These are the four little links that you might be interested, based on the topic that you're looking at. So maybe that's already being thought of, but I think it's a nice way to use AI for website pages. And then again, between the feedback from the customer or the, they are our customers, the community, that feedback and the clicks and that kind of thing. But then the search engine could actually start looking at the AI and start building. What are those links that they had? Oh, I didn't even know there was a link there for that. Oh, I can actually go to GIS and look at you know, my neighbor or my friend or whatever. I think those things are another opportunity to explore. So having said that, I think that's all I have. And I think if there isn't anything else, thank you so much. Congratulations for a huge award at NACO. And thank you, Mr. Sarman and the assessor's office for being a part of that. We are now hearing the transition music. Okay. All right, I think we're ready.

All right, moving on to our last kind of targeted message for you. We're going to talk through targeted priority messaging and service delivery. With me, I have Nancy Lewenhagen, our communications director, and Bethany Drysdale, our media and communications program manager. And I believe I'm kicking this directly over to Nancy to begin with.

Back to your point. And you are also part of this. You're going to kick us at the end.

At the end.

You're going to kick us. Rapid. Not kick us. Rapid. You're not going to kick us off. Well, you did just kick us off.

We have security here.

Nancy Lewenhagen, for the record. I'm the communications director here. And I'm joined with... Bethany Drysdale.

Also not on. Because we're good at this. But I'll be speaking in a little bit.

All right. Just a couple of things that we're going to go over today. Three, really three areas that we're going to cover for you guys. Targeted and proactive messaging. Regional coordination and readiness through crisis, which I think is really eye-opening for all of us as well. And building culture of customer service and how important that is.

Okay. You are correct that these things. There you go.

Just leave it on.

Okay. We do at the end of this want to walk away Understanding communication strategies to mirror the expectations We talked a lot about the changing expectations of residents and we've been changing with them But I don't think that we've told you that and so we're going to kind of walk through how we've been doing that And we really are at a tipping point with residents. They are expecting different right now. They're expecting delivery in a different way and so That's what we will be showing you today and then centralizing information digitally, but also physically, and we'll get into that in a little while as well.

So the through line for all of this, of course, is service and using a diverse set of tools to reach our residents. And clear communication, of course, is a service. Resident expectations require us to use more channels, more than just traditional media and social posts and maybe the things that we used to do with press releases. We do all of that, but examples include also podcasting, broader social networks, op-eds, FAQs, stronger enhanced website information, much of what you just heard from Tammy and our digital team as well.

And Tammy mentioned the front door to our information. The website really is. But there's a lot of windows as well, a lot of other ways to peek in there. And so, you know, for a long time we were able to do a press release. Media would pick it up, and there would be a story. It would run a couple times, and that's how people got the information. This is not news to any of you. That's not how it works anymore. it's also not just a social post there are just so many different ways you know i drive 40 minutes every morning 40 minutes home every afternoon and listening to podcasts that's how i'm getting my information so each of these things together is how we are going to reach more people perhaps have more touch points maybe they'll see a press release maybe they'll make it at home in time to see the news maybe they won't watch the news maybe they'll just look at the recaps later on on their tick tock feed So there are just so many different ways. And I know I'm preaching to the choir because we all are engaging in this stuff already. But this is why you'll see us doing things just a bit differently. And so that's why we want to communicate to you why we are doing those things.

So let's go back to the targeted and proactive messaging. And as we continue to talk about that, and with the REF TELUS report, realignment of your board meetings and your workshops like today's, we have a more clear-cut idea on the board's priorities. You're more proactive in telling us about those. That allows us to be more proactive in messaging for those for you. We hear from you. We know we're following along those lines, but we've got senior services, attainable housing, eviction mitigation, behavioral health, community involvement, quality of life. You recently voted to add equine businesses, agro-tourism, heat mitigation, dark skies, and public noticing. And all of that really builds that roadmap for us and for our team and following that for you so we can enhance that messaging.

This will sound a little archaic, but I love the idea of kind of the old-fashioned press kit. We want to provide that sort of thing to you. So in a kit, a package, however you want to say that, you might have a press release and talking points about each of these topics that are important to you. Knowing what's important to you then helps us develop that messaging. We can develop social posts that you can go share. You don't have to create it all on your own. We can put it all together into tabs Each touch point that you have with the public, we can help arm you with that information. And so that's what we are really hoping to do. We hope that you will like that sort of delivery of information. But again, back to these topics that you've already identified for us, what's important to you. Let us arm you with information about those. You should never be in a place in the county where you're at a cocktail party and somebody asks, hey, you know, the board just voted on such and such. You know, tell me about that. We want to make sure that you have all that information.

And as you know, we just hired a social media person. And we make, and back to videos and shareable reels, we make so much of this information, but we haven't always done a good job of asking you to share it and showing you where it is and building those toolkits. And that's exactly what we're here for. But in addition to your priorities, we're also using much of the same approach to enhance messaging for our departments, as you heard, digitally and, of course, through all of our channels. Most recently, we met with our public guardian, working on a campaign that will roll out this fall, and for that, we're using this as an example because, again, it goes back to our residents need to go back to the website. It's not updated. The forms are not correct. So we met and we assigned tasks and we met with the public guardian and we said, here's some things you can do. Here's some things we can do. As Tammy mentioned, web administration light, we're putting that to practice. Some of our smaller departments don't have, you know, you've heard from the assessor, but many of our smaller departments don't have that template or the support. That's what we're here for, and we're going to work with them this summer to refresh. So, again, going back to, yeah, we can do press releases, we can do media stories, we can do social reels, which we will do. for the Public Guardian podcast, building up to a particular campaign in the fall, which is a target that that office needs. But it's a great example of how we're going to work and package our information and just make things more accessible for punch through with a diverse set of tools for messaging. Much of in this particular case includes senior services or senior citizens and making it a little bit more easier to find.

Okay, so we're gonna switch gears just slightly, but it's still in the theme of customer service. Communications is customer service. Communicating with residents, it's not just customer service, really it's our duty. That's probably never more obvious than in an emergency. And we have heard from residents, we have heard from you, we need better information during an emergency. I'm sure you understand this behind the scenes. There's jurisdictions. We're not going to go speak for a city. The city's not going to speak for us. We're not going to go speak for Truckee Meadows Fire. They do their own. But that means there's a lack of a single source of information, of vetted information. So I'm going to go back in time just a little bit and tell you kind of how what I'm going to show you how it came to be during COVID-19. We ran into this. Everybody's trying to share information about COVID. Nobody knew anything about COVID. What do you do? How long do you need to stay home? How do you really need six feet of separation? So we created COVID. COVID19washoe.com, and this was a single point of information that the entire region could share. We built a lot of equity in that site. We had a lot of traffic to that site. We had an accompanying Twitter ex-account. Then we all kind of got used to COVID and we didn't really necessarily need all that information on that site anymore. But we didn't want to lose the site. So we changed the URL to emergencywashoe.com. And we've been using that for a little while. But again, kind of every jurisdiction doing their own thing in an emergency. Then as a region, we went to Emmitsburg for a FEMA really deep dive training. As a region, there were what, 30 something, 30 people from around the region going there to train together. And it came up again, what are we gonna do in a massive emergency where the city is putting up an FAQ on their site, Sparks is putting up another FAQ, Washoe County has information. That's too much, it's too much for residents to keep track of. So we came back from that and we said, okay, let's continue to develop this regional site idea. So we did, and we've been meeting with not just our counterparts at the two cities, but really with partners around the region, and I'll go a little bit more into that in just a second. But the point is that we have one really one source of vetted information that the whole region can use. So with that, we're going to switch over. I'm going to walk you through the website, kind of a live demo of the website, and then we'll get back and talk a little bit more about this.

I do want to point out that Bethany worked really hard with our local groups and our PIO groups, we all did, got together, and also our technology services department in getting and refreshing this website along with our Joshua Andresen from communications division. And it took months to update And willingness, you know, we all got together and rewrote things and we need this and we need this. And so I just want to shout out that this was, again, a collaboration of both from technology services, our team, and our PIO groups throughout the region helped lift this.

Yeah, this is not a Washoe County site. This is not a Washoe County emergency management site. This is really a regional site. And so it did take a lot of meeting, a lot of buy-in. And I do want to give kudos to Kyson Coombs with the tech services department and Joshua Andreasen from our communications division, really listening to not just me, again, not just Washoe County site, not a Bethany Drysdale, here's what I want site, but really a regional site and meeting the needs of our partners. So we realized what we want people to know, we kind of already had in various other places. Perimeter.com. Well, okay, we're telling everybody in an emergency, go to Perimeter.com. You can see road closures. You can see evacuation zones. Yeah, but they also want to see... The webcams, they want to see the fire webcams. We're not going to say, okay, now go to the fire webcam site. That defeats the whole point here. So we were able to pull in all these different platforms, these different portals from other sites. We've got NV Energy outages. This is pulling directly from the NV Energy website. So we are not recreating. We are not taking their information and filtering it through our lens. It is directly from their site. Weather map. Air quality. traffic map, and then what we do as communicators, it's not just pulling information from other sites, but then scrolling down, we know people wanna know if there's an evacuation, how many people are in it? How many people are being evacuated? Where are the shelters? So we've got those right here as well. And then scrolling down, here's the written updates. Here are the vetted press releases, vetted by the incident commander, by the Joint Information Center, whatever the emergency might call for at the time. So as you can see, the last kind of major region-wide thing was earthquakes back in April, and before that was really the Davis fire. and say we're fortunate if we don't have to update the site very often but we do want people to get used to seeing this. This is where City of Reno, City of Sparks, Remsa, RTC, the hospitals, we've all been getting together and actually I'm going to get to that in another site and get all excited because this has really been a very exciting thing that we've been doing. This is where we have all agreed to send our residents. So it doesn't matter what jurisdiction you're in. It doesn't matter where the city limit falls. We can all point to this. We want to arm all of you with social posts, something you can put up on your social feed that says, you know, active emergency, go to emergencywashoe.com or whatever it might be. We can also change the header. Right now you can see it says there are no regional emergencies at this time. That's a good thing. We want that green header on there all the time, but there will be times that we'll have to change that and we are able to do that. The other really big thing that I'm pointing at Joshua and Jarrison, he really listened to us in this and helped us develop a way for anybody to access this who has credentials. Again, if it's a Washoe County site, you have to be a Washoe County employee to add to it. Well, that, again, defeats the purpose. So he developed it on a WordPress site. WordPress is behind some very, very, see, based out in the back, behind some very strict walls. So, you know, the security is there. But also that anybody who we have authorized to access the site can access the site. The worst thing is to be up at the Emergency Operations Center in an emergency, And, oh no, the person who accesses this is on vacation. Or, oh no, I don't remember my password. What's my password? So we've developed this to make it really easy. In an emergency, you don't have time for those sorts of things. So this is, again, very exciting. It's been several years in the making. not because we've been dragging our feet, but really wanting to do it right. And I think that, again, I've used the term tipping point a couple times. We are at that tipping point where this is what residents expect. They don't expect all jurisdictions doing their own thing. They want us working together, and that's what we've really listened to and what we've been doing. So with that, let's go back to the PowerPoint. So to develop this, we have been meeting regionally with other PIOs. We have a robust group now. And when I say PIOs, I'm not talking for those that don't speak government jargon, public information officers. We're the people in the organizations who are getting together, especially in an emergency, and getting out the vetted information. But this is not just, again, Reno, Sparks, Washoe County, maybe Truckee Meadows Fire. We're meeting with REMSA. We're meeting with Renown, NV Energy, the airport, Tumwa, all these organizations. Once you start meeting, you realize, oh my gosh, school districts, they need to be involved. If there's an emergency, they need to talk to their parents and the students. So we've been meeting, for one, to know who each other is. who each other are in an emergency, so that when there is an emergency, we're not wondering, oh my gosh, OK, wait, I need to contact NV Energy. I don't remember who that is. We know each other. We know how to reach each other. We know about each other's kids. When you have those personal relationships with people, communicating in an emergency is just so much easier, so much more seamless. And that's what residents expect from us. They don't want a bunch of strangers getting together and learning how to contact each other when there's a fire. So this group, we are meeting quarterly. We are not just meeting for the sake of meeting, and that's been really important to this group. None of us just want a meeting on our calendar. We want to be working in these groups. So we are meeting, and we're doing tabletop exercises. We're walking through WebEOC. How do you access it? How do you use it? How do you update this website that it just showed you? We're making sure that these are working meetings. We want to be fully deployable in an emergency. and having a deep bench. I may be on vacation. Who at Washoe County is going to be in that room? It may be an emergency that doesn't require the school district. So knowing who would be involved in each emergency. And again, the very last thing and the most important thing, unified messaging. So we're all singing from the same songbook. That's so important, especially in an emergency.

And I think it's important to point out that emergency management, Kelly Echevarria and her team are embedded daily, come to the PIO meetings. And they also, you know, we don't do this alone. None of this is done alone. So we're... Hats off to all of them. And I think everyone does understand there's not this magic list of who the contacts are when the emergency arises because it depends on the emergency. COVID taught us that. All the players are not going to be the same every single day. Every single emergency will allow us to connect with different people. But we know how to do that. Yay. And finally, we're on our final topic, and we're almost there. The final one we want to highlight today is building a culture of customer service. We started Washoe 311 in 2017 in the manager's office, quickly realized that it was a function of communications because we were directly interacting with our customers. constituents calling asking us questions and it's a messaging mechanism both. Since that time it has evolved into a customer service center. Residents don't know jurisdictions, they don't know departments, they just want one place to go and that means consolidating customer service. Washo 311 matters because it centralizes access. It simplifies a lot of the hurdles that we're talking about when people just, when you're talking about if we don't have the right information or back to the chat bot. We do want human interaction. They don't have to call. They can email or send us public records requests. That's another huge part of what Washoe 311 does. And now it's become a robust hub for all of that, whether it's election information, whether it's someone asking something that belongs to City of Reno, City of Sparks. We answer it all. And I will tell you, If you stop and talk to our Washoe 311 staff on any given day, it's like your child's kindergarten teacher. They know everything. You cannot imagine the questions and the things they get about different departments. And that's something that we really, really want to continue to work on and involve and bring the level up for customer service, building a better culture of customer service.

So we've been working with 311, trying to figure out, you know, everybody needs professional development. We should all have professional development all the time. So we were looking at what can we give Washo 311 to really be an even better source of customer service? And we found there is not really great training for government call center customer service. There's call center training. Well, we're not a credit card company having to take calls from all over the world. So that kind of training didn't really fit. We're not just customer service. The training for that is more geared toward retail. We're not trying to make a sale. So we actually reached out to TMCC's EPIC program. And they're helping us develop a specially designed training program for government call center, customer service call centers. They actually just got back to us this week. There is a certification. It's called the Direct Contact Service Professional Certification. And this is actually through a national organization. And they're going to design it for local governments. And this is something that, with Manager Thomas' goal of really building this culture of customer service, We expect our staff to be the very best. We expect residents when they call to get the help that they need without being transferred 10 times, without being put on hold for 20 minutes. And this is just, this is what we expect, it's what residents expect. And so we're really, really excited about this next step in customer service from 311. And I do have to say, addressing what you guys said about the app, Yes, we want that for sure. We actually had a demo from a company. Right now, the service request platform that we use, we've been using it for a long time. The cost has been static, so we've stayed with them for a long time. There are costs for other platforms like that, but that's where... the direction, I suppose, will come from. What kind of level do we want to give our residents? And when we added Next Request as our public records platform a year and a half ago, two years ago, it was because of that. The public records request platform was just no longer working the way that we were band-aiding it and making it kind of work for us. didn't cut it anymore. And so we took the step to get a platform that actually did what residents need us to do. So that would be my only kind of off-script comment about that. We know it. We would love to be able to take a picture and send it in. And it creates not just a service request automatically, but a work order. And it's the same number. So residents only have one number to track instead of two. be amazing. But anyway.

And photo uploads. We'd love that. But yes. And that goal, what we're talking about with the customer service and manager Thomas's goal, one of your seven goals, is enhancing that not just for Washoe 311, but for the entire front, you know, for the entire county staff that deals with front counter and offering that throughout. And in taking that enhanced customer service to the next level, it's through, it's not just through people calling and emailing, but physically visiting the county. We know that, right? Today, I stopped from one meeting to another. A gentleman was trying to get through double doors right outside of HR, which, by the way, I I think is a technology services little closet. I'm not exactly sure, but sir, can I help you? Well, I was told to go to double doors down by engineering, and we guided him back down to the double doors down by, not the double doors. Anyway, I'm sure it's daily for all of us, that interaction. And so we're going to, that's our last thing we want to talk to you about today, is having that 311 team lead our single point of entry initiative in building A. And that would take place, of course, after the Registrar of Voters Office completes its move to the warehouse after 2026. This is nothing that's gonna happen tomorrow. But we do need to plan for it. We do need to do the customer service training. We do need to reach out to the other departments. And we need to bring that level up and enhance it because people like to physically visit this place. There's a lot to do here. And in the wayfaring confusion in our county complex, is confusing. It's also unsafe. I'm not a security expert, but if Ben West was here or anybody else, all those multiple points of entry is just really, you know, it needs to take a look at updating. So we're going to combine that all into a one Washoe mindset. And with that, I'm going to bring in Dave Solero to talk about the things I can't talk about, which is building.

You're doing a great job. Yes, my bailiwick, the built environment, I would say. So as you all know, I've worked for the county for quite some time, probably longer than I really want to admit. But I do love it so much, you know, providing the things that we provide for our citizens. But, you know, one of my first roles here was as an architect, and I oversaw finalization of the, at the time, the administration complex facilities master plan. And in that document, there was a discussion around how do we get the engineering, the planning, and the building services in a convenient location. We call it a one-stop shop for our citizens. At the time, they were all where they currently are today at the other end of the hall. But there were three distinct departments. It was very confusing for our citizens. Now, fast forward to the latest iteration of our facilities master plan, and we're still talking about a single point of entry for this complex. And it's really for the building and the things within building A at this point. We have the treasurer and the assessor over in building D. They essentially have a single point of entry for those two offices, kind of interchangeable, one location. And again, it goes back to security and just ease for our citizens. We have the health district in building B. A couple of different ways to get in there. Eventually love to just go to one location, for the citizens to come there. But with parking, it gets a little different, but I think we can get there. But really, here in Building A, we've been stymied by having multiple departments with their own front counters all throughout the complex. And you ask anybody that's got a front counter within this complex, and number one thing is people don't know where they're going, they don't understand what they're doing, and so the front counter becomes an information portal for everybody that comes in. Every different department. It doesn't matter if you're here for a marriage license. We run into people upstairs in the manager's office looking for a marriage license, right? And so just constant directing in some of those things. So in the latest iteration of the facility master plan, the concept of a single point of entry. really starts to take shape, especially as Nancy mentioned with the registrar of voters and that kind of every couple year intensive public interaction moving elsewhere and the things that have to happen there allows us to create a different mindset in how we serve our customer. Nancy mentioned it. We've all done it. We can see the look on someone's face when they walk in the building and they have no idea where they need to go or why. Let's take that confusion away for our citizens. Let's let them come into the building and have 311. professional representatives representing washoe county to ask the question we could put in a million signs nobody's going to read them they're going to go looking for the happy face and ask that person a question it's just human nature and yes as much as we'd like to drive people to our website and provide that information for them people still want to come in in physical form and and talk with us so imagine a world where someone walks in and we have a series of counters And Washoe County employees come to the customer instead of the customer going to the employees. We do an awful lot of our work right now with appointments and other things. We know when people are coming. There are still people to drop in. But, you know, we can make this a lot easier for the customer, better for our employees, better use of space for Washoe County. I've said it to this group before. Space is expensive. to build new space is very expensive. And so if we can utilize their space a little bit differently, not have to duplicate all of the front counters throughout the, you know, the building. And even if someone ends up over in building D, we can have technology so that they can either do their transaction right there with building a, or they can walk across courtyard and come see us. But there are other ways to do this. We've, You know, the things we've learned in the last six years have been pretty impressive as far as providing that service. So we're headed down a path. Just wanted to kind of give you the preview that we're headed down down this path to design this this kind of one stop shop. I don't know. Maybe that's not the best word, but, you know, we're not single point of entry there. We'll take the multiple entrances down to hopefully three here. We are successful in this in other county buildings. in directing the employee or the customer to where the employees need them to be so that we can help them. So just a little preview of just some preliminary drawing. This is early, early, early on, but an area where the customer can come in, they can do the transaction either at a window or if there's a meeting that needs to occur, the county staff will come down, series of meeting rooms, They can be hybrid in nature as well, so we can have people from out of state come in and talk planning or whatever it might be. Super excited that after almost 25 years, hopefully we'll get to this point where it's convenient for our customer and it's more efficient, I think, for our employees as well. So that's what we've got. So we can go to the next one and contemplate some questions. Seems like I end up being the question guy for you all. But really, you know, trying to understand some of those things that are important for you as far as targeted messaging to the public. And then what are you hearing from your constituents that we should focus on for messaging or customer service?

Mr. Clark, do you have anything that you'd like to add?

Vice Chair Garcia. ACM Solero, if you can orient me on the map. I was wondering that, too. You are here. I'm sitting in that big blob over on the right. I get that. I'm sure the county clerk and the recorder are constantly one of those first points of entry, and then their front office staff are fielding a lot of these. Where am I going? What can I find? But where's the recorder's office on this?

So in this concept, right, we show, I'm trying to think now how it's oriented. Sorry, on the bottom section, yeah, that horizontal, that is currently where the clerk's office is. So that's a series. And again, this is an early rendition of what we did. I've spoken with the clerk and the recorder earlier, We're super early into this. I brought this out, and they've got already some changes that they'd like to see. But essentially, the recorder's office would move across the hall into the area where the ROV is. But really, it's stopping everybody from having to go down a hallway and just wandering throughout the complex. So yeah, the area is shown there with conference rooms and that is currently the recorder's office. Got it, okay, thank you. But that's just in that concept is definitely going to change, so yeah.

Anything else? Well, I just want to thank you. I know since being here in April of 2023, it's no surprise about creating a culture of customer service. I know I've said this a million times, I just did a presentation and repeated it again. Washoe County is in the customer service business delivering essential services using taxpayer dollars effectively with measurable positive outcomes. I added positive because that's what it's about, right? And so thank you for looking at the communication as a resource to get in front of topics that sometimes have misinformation and that misinformation becomes then perceived as accurate and in many cases and in many cases it's not and I think we have an opportunity through all of the tools and resources we've seen today along with your hard work be able to just It's like the Joe Friday, just the facts. Let's talk about the facts and to corroborate that so that it has, why did this happen? Well, you can click here and here's this or whatever the situation might be. I think that the point of entry is great because I can tell you I pretty much do not go, every day I'm here and every day I'm helping someone, but it is okay. And you can tell when someone is like looking around, may I help you? Oh, I'm looking for this. I'll just go down or whatever. And so I think we'll still have that. happen, but I do think having a point of entry is going to be really incredibly helpful and useful. I really want to thank you, too, for looking at WASHO 311 and trying to, again, extrapolate. We do have to be nimble. We do have to shift. We can't do the business the same way we've done business, but then putting the knowledge they may have to your point must be amazing. It must be amazing. And I really also want to thank you for even the compilation of information that we get as commissioners so that we can understand what folks are talking about and what we can do to help. And then lastly, I'll say thank you for including the CAB as part of that, because that is another useful resource to look at, again, pointing people in the right direction with the right information. And so I think... One more thing, if you're done. Yeah, I think it's also really, really, I think, again, really important. You talked about unified message. We're really one county, one message. And when you're in an emergency, that is not the time to... have some of the things that we've seen happen. So thank you for you and all the PIOs and everyone who may not understand ICS, maybe not understand the FEMA training that you went to that kind of prompted you in Emsburg. I've been there too. And so it's great because then everyone is one county, One message. It's not a website developed for one jurisdiction. It's a website that's a research with fact-based information for everyone. And that, I think, is really, really cool. So one county, one message. So thank you so much. And Vice Chair Garcia has additional question or comment.

I just wanted to piggyback on you, Chair Andriola, about the website, emergencywasha.com. This needs to go out to the elected officials because I know from time to time people go rogue in their messaging and they're sending people to the wrong locations. And when I was looking at the homepage, I was kind of questioning at first why perimeter was the homepage. But after I looked at what's listed on there, it's so comprehensive on everything. It provides what's playing at the Pioneer Theater, the RTO, and the traffic and wind and everything like that. So it makes sense the way you structured the website. It's very impressive. Congratulations on all that hard work coming together. But we help us disseminate the information that is centralized and accurate. I encourage you to give us things to share and disseminate with our constituents and I hopefully the other electeds and the other jurisdictions will be receptive to this too.

Thanks. Thanks. So we're all looking forward to the toolkit. We're all looking forward to being able to turn information because we are again one county and we're based on facts and I think that's what we have to as commissioners be responsible for talking about facts and So thank you for helping to allow us to do that and talk to constituents in our community. So I don't have anything else. I know county manager would like to say a few words in terms of wrapping this up. So I'll turn it over to her.

Thank you. First of all, thank you to the board. It's been three strategic planning meetings of very, there's a lot of information that you heard. So thank you for indulging us on this piece. And I know that it's a lot, but we appreciate the input and the ability to not just tell the board what's going on, but all the other departments and anybody else that's listening. I think it's really good information. We don't often have the opportunity to sit with you at this length this immersively and talk about these things but really quick I just wanted to say I think the resounding theme in all three of these has been leadership. The county is a regional leader with an exceptional staff that are bringing forward ideas and concepts from moving upstream, our built environment and how we should look to develop and grow in this region and then today around technology so I just can't thank staff enough for what you all have brought forward and it makes us all so proud to see in real time the leadership that this organization is putting forward in this region and we just heard a little bit more about that but I know ACM Celera has some information on what our next steps are coming out of this workshop so thank you.

Yeah absolutely thanks County Manager Thomas and so from here we're going to continue to utilize the information that we've gathered from you all you know over the last three sessions And then we're going to get back together with what we call our strategic planning committee. We're also going to talk again with the elected officials and department heads to kind of vet some of the work that comes with our strategic planning committee in a way to take the information we've gotten, the themes that we've gotten from you all in December, and really create the next upcoming fiscal year 27 through 29 strategic plan. Hope to be back in front of you in August for adoption of the plan. Hopefully we can get there. There's a lot of work to go between now and they're actually setting up those initiatives and really getting the, you know, the understanding from the department heads how this fits into their current work plan and some of those other things. trying to get to the point where when we're getting into the budget season next year, we've got a document that we can all sit behind and understand how this is tied to the initiatives associated with the budget as well. So look to see us back in the August timeframe. I think you've got one meeting in August, late August. So that should give us enough time to at least get this framework back in front of you with some strong direction for the new strategic plan. So With that, I do really appreciate the input from not only the departments, but our external members that have come and talked with Washoe County to let us know what's really happening regionally. I think it's really important, as we saw with the. with the budget workshop early on, just the outside lens that we can put into our work here to make sure that we are not going down this trail all on our own. We are all trying to solve very similar problems. And so I really appreciate your input as well into that because I think it's gonna give us a very strong strategic plan moving forward. Thank you.

And I thought we really need to thank you again for all of your fast typing and note taking and all of your contributions and so thank you so much. So hearing nothing else from anyone I'm going to ask for public comment at this time please.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is our final public comment, and comment heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person. It may pertain to matters both on and off the commission agenda. Please make your comments to the commission as a whole.

Do we have any public comment? We do not. All right. Seeing no public comment, we're going to adjourn this meeting at 328. Thank you so much.