City of Morgan Hill Communications Assessment

Steve and Maureen frequently work together to discuss information that should be shared with the community. Rather than utilizing a traditional City Manager newsletter, information is communicated through email blasts, city council agenda previews, and social media. Steve does convene weekly internal “Leadership Huddles” with Department Heads to review ongoing and upcoming City projects, events and policy issues. Maureen attends these meetings to surface information that could or should be shared with the Morgan Hill community, but Communications is not a specific agenda item with a dedicated amount of time to discuss. Both Steve and Maureen are working on further empowering individual Departments to manage their own communication efforts, whether through digital platforms, printed collateral or verbal interactions with the community. In times when Maureen is out of the office, Nichole Martin often fills in to execute some of Maureen’s Communications responsibilities. Previously, Maureen had a part-time temporary employee who helped execute some day-to-day Communications responsibilities. The hours for this position currently are budgeted, but the position is unfilled at this time. Administrative Services Cities’ Administrative Services Departments generally have few highly visible touchpoints with the community but still serve vital Communications functions. Christina Turner is the Assistant City Manager in charge of Administrative Services, which includes: Finance/Budget, Utility Billing, Human Resources, Information Services, and Council Services/Records Management. Finance/Budget Dat Nguyen and Harjot Sangha are Morgan Hill’s Finance Director and Accounting Manager, respectively. The Finance team produces the City’s annual “Budget in Brief” document: Dat and Harjot supply the content while Hilary Holeman—an Administrative Analyst in the City Manager’s Office—helps with the layout. Budget documents are posted to the “Budget” page on the City website (first page under the ‘Government’ dropdown/Finance) as a digital “flipbook” (new this past year) and PDF files. The City has posted one year of budget-related documents so far using FlippingBook, a tool that allows users to interactively ‘flip’ through and search for specific content within pages of digital files: Adopted Operating and CIP Budget for FY 2016-17 & 2017-18. Currently, the City is not tracking metrics associated with these FlippingBook files.

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