Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 18
streamlined communications with just one direct avenue for the media to get information or the public
to get information.
Alderman Klee
Follow up, thank you | really do appreciate that and | want to comment to the Department of Public
Health. That one page that you have on the COVID-19 | have shared that and | have gotten a lot of
really good responses. Thank you for all the information that you have on it, you have the CDC
information, the one-page information that explains what is and what are the symptoms thereof, it’s
been very helpful. Thank you. So that really goes a long way.
Alderman Lopez
Do you have plans for making sure that information can be disseminated to people who are deaf or
people who are speaking different languages?
Director Kates
Yeah so that was one of the concerns that we had brought up at our leadership meeting this morning
was to ensure that any of the materials that are put out there can be done in multiple languages. IT
did go through a process to ensure that the translate function on the web site is functioning properly
and is working. They also sent us sort of like a fact sheet to enable us to let the public know about that
type of information and we pushed that out through our Joint Information Center.
The thing that the Joint Information Center will help us to do is to leverage the resources that we have
in other Departments to do translation services because as an example, our office doesn’t have that
capability if we send out a Press Release. | can’t translate those things. So the School Department
has some of those capabilities, Public Health has some of those capabilities, so we can share the
wealth to ensure that any of that kind of stuff, regardless of whether it is specific to that Department or
not, can use those same services.
Kim Kleiner, Administrative Services Director
Good evening, just to build off of that, so everybody knows if you go to the City’s Web Site through
Google, Google Translation, and that point was raised today just to build off of that. So where we are,
we have started working with Director Kates and Director Bagley what seems like weeks ago now but
probably not that long. Originally the Mayor came to you and asked you for $50,000.00, so let’s start
there. That really was Phase |. We needed those funds in order to purchase supplies in order to have
overtime and some temporary help to keep City Hall clean, not only City Hall, all of our City Buildings,
Public Health Building, that was really Phase |. To keep the residents and the employees that are in
our buildings safe. So we thank all of our City employees for working hard, cleaning their surfaces,
cleaning their areas. We thank our City Building Staff for going over and above. That was that first
Phase.
So now as we look to move to the Second Phase and we look to have people work remotely like
Director Kates said, that is challenging in a municipality. You’ve seen much more of it in the private
sector. So currently, we have over 100 employees that have access to Citrix and for those of you that
don’t know what Citrix is, Citrix is a software that allows you to dial in remotely and access our City
Systems. So whether it be Kronos our payroll system or whether it be Lawson our financial system
