Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 19
our purchasing system, that Citrix Remote Desktop allows you to do that. So we had 100 people that
had access. We had 20 licenses, which at that time fit us because most commonly the people that
you would see using this capability was your Division Directors or employees that had reasons that
they might need to sign on during the night or weekends. It doesn’t fit in a situation like this where we
will need essential employees to be able to access systems while working remotely from home.
So what we needed to do was to purchase additional licenses, but that caused a challenge in itself
because we didn’t have enough servers to put these licenses. So we have to purchase additional
servers, roughly $25,000.00 in cost plus the additional Citrix licenses, roughly another $26,000.00 in
cost. So that’s two big pieces right there. Then we have our phone system. So in order for people to
be able to answer their phones and not have people in the building, our IT Department has identified
what they call “soft phones”. So the phone will, instead of ringing to a desk here, it will ring to the
employee’s phone, should it be their cell or their home phone at home. But the public will think they
are calling the same phone that they always called here at the City. So we have to purchase those
licenses.
Another challenge, we didn’t have the hardware and the laptops and the Chromebooks and like for all
of our City employees to be able to sign out. Generally employees that have had laptops and
Chromebooks and things like that are the Board of Aldermen, Division Directors, so we needed to
order additional laptops and Chromebooks, which | will tell you right now are going at a premium
because everyone else is buying them as well. So today we purchased two Chromebooks, 20 laptops
and our IT Director is working on more. There’s going to be more challenges, so as we look to have
people working remotely, our IT Department is also working on increased security in what we call “two
authentication” so there is some software purchases that he will need to make there, just to strengthen
our security. We are in a good spot but whenever you have this amount of people accessing remotely,
it is a good thing to look at. And we have a very dedicated team and a very experienced team on that.
There’s a number of challenges with having people work remotely. There are payroll challenges. So
right now everybody in the City has some supervisor that approves their timecards through Kronos.
We are looking at the Payroll Department to really look at paying people pay to schedule so that we
don’t need all those people to remotely dial in and approve timecards. What that will do is that might
mean some adjustments down the line, but really when you are working this remotely you don’t want
to have so many people having to tax the system. The other thing is purchasing, we are working to
make sure that should there be an emergency request, or some items that the Police Department or
the Fire Department or the DPW who are actively working need that we can make sure that those are
met and that we can make those purchases and make them as quickly as possible for them. So we
are working with our Purchasing Department, we are working with HR and Payroll and we are working
with IT.
The other Department that has really stepped up and is taking a big role is Risk. So as we look to
close City Buildings, that means access to the buildings and that’s where Risk comes into play. So
they will be dealing with setting up employees that do have access to continue to come into the
building and making sure that our public does not have access to come into the building until we are
ready to provide our services again. So you will see on your desks this evening, there is a Press
Release that went out that we did make an addendum to our contract on the revaluation. This was
approved by the DRA and interior inspections for the revaluation have been temporarily suspended
effective immediately. The other part that we have already worked on is there are no performances
being held at Court Street. So we took that as of last Friday, we asked all of our tenants at Court
Street to suspend any performances. That’s working along with the social distancing put out by the
CDC.
