BRANDON -- One side benefit to Brandon city council meetings going paperless is the wisecracks some councillors now email each other on their desktop computers.Mayor Dave Burgess won't talk out of school but did allow a case where a city manager's computer kept beeping and found himself barraged with emails of the "Shuddap!" variety.

The downside is, councillors no longer have sheets of paper to ball up and throw at each other. Not that they would.

The City of Brandon has been a pioneer in the paperless game since April of 2007.
That's when it began putting council agendas -- three inches thick worth of paper -- onto desktop computers.
Considering bureaucracies and paper go together like bees and hexagonal cells, that's an achievement.
The City of Winnipeg only began paperless agendas last fall.

Brandon's move easily covered the $11,000 cost to supply laptop computers for council use. In total, going paperless has saved taxpayers about $40,000 so far, said Burgess.

The change resulted in one less clerk position and significantly less paper, photocopying, time and fuel -- fuel, because with part-time councillors, the agenda had to be hand-delivered to their homes Friday afternoons, before the next week's council meeting.

Staff used to produce 24 agendas each meeting -- that's an agenda and all the supporting documentation -- for councillors, administrative staff and media.

Laptops also allow for a continuous flow of information between councillors and administrative staff.
Many councillors will ask up to a dozen questions of city staff via email before entering a council meeting.
Agendas are put online for the public to see. Councillors can make notes on agenda items and highlight key parts on their computers.

Brandon had two trial runs before going paperless and there were some glitches. Information technology staff were standing by to help.

The paperless movement advanced again when the city's 2010 budget document was put online. Because it was the first time, councillors were provided with the paper version, too. Eight of 10 councillors still had to refer to the paper version.

Many reports and written submissions from the public and governments are now scanned into a computer and then destroyed. It was hard at first for city officials to bring themselves to destroy physical documents and feel secure with just computer files, said city clerk Conrad Arvisais.

The moves have resulted in a lot fewer paper files going to what's called the Dead Storage Room, said Ian Richards, city records and documents manager. Paper file storage takes up about a third of the city hall basement.
Richards believes city archives are used too seldom to make it worthwhile to convert them electronically. Also, the jury's still out on electronic archives. There have been "horror stories" of organizations losing their electronic archives due to software obsolescence or data corruption, he said.

City orders like zoning, variances, conditional uses still use a lot of paper, as does the planning department with its blueprints. But the city is always looking at ways to reduce.

The result is Arvisais's desk: barren, as if he'd been fired or away on a cruise ship.

"You see an office like this with no files, it's almost embarrassing," Arvisais said. "And I'm old school."
Arvisais allowed himself at least one Mad Men moment (a TV show that takes place in the 1960s). "I used to recite into a Dictaphone and have a draft typed up, and then I'd write the final version from the draft. Now I just type my report into the computer," he said.

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2010 A4