OpenGov

“Before we switched to OpenGov, it was basically you did things in a spreadsheet or on paper. While the old system was functional, right, I mean, it did what it was supposed to do, It was clunky and not very intuitive at all. Like, you had to go through seven steps to do one thing.”

“The budgeting, planning, and procurement suite with OpenGov is we’ve come from the stone ages into twenty twenty four with modern processes and, and modern procedures.”

“What used to take literal weeks and months, we”

“The OpenGov customer service team makes themselves available to others on the team, not just the main point-of-contact at City of Ashland, which is very helpful.”

“OpenGov has been instrumental in enabling us to put all the data including line item details into the budget proposal and make it far easier to understand as the single source of truth. The technology innovation is why we’ve chosen to partner with OpenGov to drive our strategic vision forward.”

“50% time savings have freed my staff up from drudgery, enabling them to focus on things to help move this city forward!”

“I’ve been doing the budget here for 20 years, and this year has been the easiest budget yet. I’ve had no issues.”

“Because of our drainage system management program and documentation of it, their lawyers never bothered to file the suit,” says Hartman.”

“To the extent our system could protect us from damage, it did,” says Hartman. “That is due in part to our regular inspections and the technology that helps us track the condition of the assets in the system.”

“The system performed well. The inlets were open and the detention ponds were clear so they could do their jobs,” says Hartman.”

“It allows us to document that our system is functioning to the highest level it can.”

“For stormwater, the key benefit of operations management is that it provides us with an organized approach to inspect, maintain, and repair our system,” says Hartman.”

“And so for me, I wanted to make sure that my constituents were well served and that they could see, feel, and hear their government at work, putting their hard-earned tax dollars, to good productive daily work. And so the combination of smart people, dedicated, professionals, alongside good technology and technology that helps to bring systems and approaches together is the reason why I am so proud of the work that we’ve been able to accomplish.”

“Accomplishing the work without Cartegraph… it would be tough. It gives more of that time management. If you’re out in the field and you’re able to have your tablet with you, any new requests come in, they can be addressed. If I get any type of call of ‘do you have a crew working at this particular location?’ I could just go in Cartegraph and tell them that it was at this particular location from this time to this time or whatnot, or if they were even at that location.”

“Cartegraph had a huge impact. We’re able to track all the work activities that we perform. We’re able to track the amount of footage, and that has made us more efficient and more streamlined. In doing this plan, we were able to achieve 5,000,000 linear feet.”

“Precinct two is the downstream side of not only Harris County, but four other counties. So, making sure that we have a well functioning drainage system is critical to ensuring that my residents do not flood repeatedly as they have done in the past. We went from an average of about 300,000 linear feet a year of drainage maintenance to a million in 2020 during the pandemic.”

“To reduce potential flooding, commissioner Adrian Garcia challenged us to come up with a drainage maintenance plan. As part of that, we had staff go out and evaluate every street with drainage systems. And with that, we developed the worst-first strategy, where over these last four or five years, we’ve been addressing the worst first. We were hitting areas that were never maintained for the last 20 years.”

“I was always open to the idea of how to modernize our approaches. So I simply charged my director, Juan Hernandez, to think about ways to take us to the next level. Not only did he take us to the next level, but whatever is second is a far distant second to where we’re at today.”

“We would put in our task for that particular day. So that would include the date, the roll log, along with the field personnel that would be within the task doing the job, and also the equipment that we would be using.”

“When I came to Precinct 2, we were using an outdated system called the red books. The red books are the journals here that would track all the work performed in our crews.”

“Running a major operation like Precinct 2 has about a 1,300,000 residents in it and covers a very significant part of the geography of Harris County, Texas. It is absolutely archaic to try to run this operation in a paper-driven manner.”

“It’s not just me managing the contracts anymore,”

“OpenGov has really created a process where we’re able to streamline our contracts into the system, and they’ve also made it very user-friendly.”

“Other members can’t see how stakeholders are scoring because they have to submit their scores in the system,”

“We can also keep track of evaluator progress, which we couldn’t do before with Excel.”