No laptops for county board!
6 comments December 12th, 2008
Tucked at the bottom of a Register Star story about Thursday night’s Winnebago County Board meeting is this nugget: “(Scott) Christiansen also asked for opinions on purchasing laptops for board members. The idea is to get rid of the paper packets members receive each meeting. The chairman said he could have a resolution read by the next meeting in two weeks.”
You want an opinion? How about this: Are you freaking nuts? That’s my tax money you’re thinking about spending on 28 laptops. That’s at least $14,000 for a bottom-end model with some sort of county discount. Load ‘em up enough to actually function and we’re talking double that. Provide maintenance (not to mention training for the dudes some of whom likely don’t know what a laptop is and don’t want to), repairs, peripherals and all the other stuff, and the county’s going to have to hire a full-time IT staffer to support those laptops. Oh, yeah, and the software has to be updated and the hardware replaced pretty regularly. And, when a board member looses his, we get to buy him a replacement? Does he get to keep it if he doesn’t get elected? I repeat: Are you nuts?
I’m all for saving paper; buying laptops isn’t the solution. How about this totally cheap-maybe-even-free — idea: Scan and post the documents to the county’s Web site. The information is public record, so it ought to be up there anyway. Board members can use their own personal laptops or computers to access the information, read it and download any important piece they want. Heck, go ahead and buy ‘em each a ream of printing paper once a quarter; if they use more than that, they pay for it themselves.
If they have to see documents at a board meeting, project them on a screen. You can buy a nifty overhead projection system for $5,000 give or take a bit of change that accesses the documents via the Web site. I know it’ll work; we do it here in the News Tower all the time.
For crying out loud, I came out of my chair when I read that paragraph this morning. We’ve got an economy imploding, people loosing their jobs left and right and the county board is considering buying itself laptops? We pay these people?
Is that enough of an opinion for you? Geesh…..
