Digital Service Act
Mayor Philips and Vice Mayor McCullough recently signed a letter to voice our support for the proposed Digital Service Act, proposed by Senator Kamala Harris. The Act would create a pool of $15 million annually in grant funding for state and local governments to hire technology talent and other digital service projects.
“We must do more to empower our state and local governments to tap into the power of technology to provide seamless, costeffective services for the 21st century,” said Kamala Harris. I couldn’t agree more 🙂
The bill recognizes that government needs to do a better job attracting and retaining tech talent to help create cheaper and more effective technology solutions. We will continue to monitor this bill and hope to get our hands on some of that money.
More information about the Digital Service Act.
Community Engagement Team Identifies First Projects
The citywide Community Engagement Team held their second meeting last week. The group chose two priority projects: multi-lingual outreach methods and a communications inventory.
The first team will work on ways we can increase civic engagement with our Latino/a/x population and other communities where English is not the primary language spoken at home. The group also talked about the importance of understanding cultural differences in addition to simply translating text.
The second team will create a communications inventory as a resource for all departments. This tool will help employees better employ different methods and strategies when conducting
outreach.
Each team will work over the next few months on developing a project plan, establishing roles and responsibilities, and report out their progress at our next meeting in June.
All Hands Meeting & Strategic Planning
Our March All-Hands meeting focused mostly on getting feedback on parts of our draft strategic plan. The team split up into small groups and talked about specific projects to address gaps in our technology support, transparency, network, connectivity, and security. Read more for a fuller summary of the meeting and the slide deck.
We’re almost ready to share our draft strategic plan and our annual work plan with other departments to get feedback.
Resident Satisfaction Survey
Every two years, the City conducts a resident satisfaction survey. The results of the most recent survey were presented to the City Council on Tuesday evening. We will be working with
departments to better understand the metrics that matter for their department. For us, we are interested in better understanding how satisfied people are with:
“Having your voice heard in City government”
| 2019 | 2017 | Change | |
| Very satisfied | 8.9% | 15.3% | -6.4% |
| Somewhat satisfied | 32.1% | 36% | -3.9% |
| Somewhat dissatisfied | 11.8% | 14.8% | -3% |
| Very dissatisfied | 10% | 4% | 6% |
| DK/NA | 37.2% | 29.9% | 7.3% |
Over the next few months, we plan to dive into the crosstab data on this with the Community Engagement Team and identify other ways to more fully understand what’s working and what
isn’t. To dig into the rest of the survey results (and prior years), visit: www.cityofsanrafael.org/resident-satisfaction-survey.