Hi,
I feel we can adapt to closing the doors. I will need to work more specifically with Julie and Dan to determine if we would need to change any information we have online. For the most part today, we try to accommodate out-of-town customers today by offering them online services or mail-in services. This could easily be adapted for local customers. The only area we might want to consider adjusting is our $1,000 ceiling on accepting credit card payments for fees. I don’t know if we can offer any flexibility on that or whether that is tied to a federal law. Credit card payments make it easier for our customers to do business remotely.
In the longer term, I also feel we can adapt to telecommuting. We would just need have more conference call check-ins on work product; online/screen-sharing meetings between Planning staff members and others, as needed. If we could find a way to forward calls from our office phones to our cell phones this would make telecommuting a lot more possible. In any event, if we ever get to a place where we are encouraging telecommuting; we would need to make sure we still have an expectation that some employees would need to visit the office to take care of business that can only occur at the office – such as processing bills, making payments, etc. For instance, I would still need to sign-off on any bills from consultants and should be able to move those on to Finance either from the office or at home. That’s just one example among many – where staff would still need to be committed to working in the office – if we get to a time when telecommuting is the direction we want to take.
I will be prepared to share this information at our 8:30 meeting.
Alice
From: Dan Huff <dhuff@cityofmolalla.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2020 4:23 PM
To: Frank Schoenfeld <fschoenfeld@molallapolice.com>; Gerald Fisher <gfisher@cityofmolalla.com>; Alice Cannon <acannon@cityofmolalla.com>; Chaunee Seifried <cseifried@cityofmolalla.com>; Diana Hadley <dhadley@lincc.org>
Cc: Christie DeSantis <cdesantis@cityofmolalla.com>; Cindy Chauran <cchauran@cityofmolalla.com>; Darlene Bishop <dbishop@cityofmolalla.com>
Subject: City Hall closure contemplation
All – I have been contemplating the issue of closing City Hall to the public daily for the last two weeks. Even though I do not want to jump on a bandwagon, especially some of the band wagons out there, it may be the right thing to do. On the other hand, I have a very different view on telecommuting or “working from home”. I for one could not self-manage myself working from home. I have a hard enough time managing myself at work! If you have employees that are concerned then we can talk about that but they will need to use some of their time to make that happen. We do have a lot of work that can be done in the meantime.
I would like you all to let me know right up front what your thoughts are regarding this issue (some I already know) and I would like to talk about this at 8:30 am tomorrow morning.
Dan Huff
City Manager
City of Molalla, Oregon
(503)829-6855
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