Council minutes now online

Peachtree City records archived back to 1959

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

In the coming months, Peachtree City residents will be able to dial up minutes from City Council meetings dating all the way back to the city's beginnings in 1959 via the Internet.

The city will have a link from its web site, www.peachtree-city.org, that hooks up to an electronic archive of the city minutes. Keyword searches of that database can be performed, which will take a lot of the heartache out of researching what council did several or many years ago, said City Clerk Nancy Faulkner.

For example, a search for a certain word in the Laserfiche database could yield several "hits." As the user clicks on each hit, two screens pop up one is an actual "photograph" of the minutes from the city's minutes records, and the other is the computer's translation of that paper into text.

"It's going to be so great," Faulkner said. "I can't tell you how many times I have to search for things in the minutes."

The only potential frustration for citizens looking at minutes online is that only five users can be on the service at one time. That's because the city only purchased five software usage licenses, although it could buy more in the future if the service proves to be popular, Faulkner said.

"This will go a long way to help providing better access to city government for our citizens," Faulkner said.

The city will continuously add to the database of council meeting minutes as Faulkner plans to update the database with the new council minutes fewer than two weeks after each council meeting. And if council votes on changing the minutes later, she can make those changes in the database itself.

Faulkner said the city plans to add more types of city documents to the online collection, although everything can't be put online. The city will look at the need for the types of documents based on how often they're being requested, she said.

"It's going to take a while before we have a big database built up," Faulkner said.

For example, minutes of the city's commissions and authorities could be next on the city's online publishing wish list, Faulkner said. Documents from the planning and zoning department are also requested often and would be nice to add soon, she said.

"We're not going to put anything on there that's not an open record," Faulkner added.

The city has its own in-house computer equipment for scanning the material into the database. And once it's scanned, it automatically becomes a part of the database, Faulkner said.

Peachtree City currently posts information provided in the "council packets" online before each city council meeting. But the format will change as the packets are put on the Laserfiche service.

That way, users can employ a keyword search to find information in specific packets, Faulkner said.

The minutes from council meetings are already scanned into the database, but the city's computer experts have to work out a few kinks before making the database available online.

City ordinances will remain in a separate database online that's maintained by a company hired by the city, Faulkner said. The software that runs that system is being upgraded to fix a few recurring glitches, she said.

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