CIO Meeting

Logan Pratt and I met with the CIO David Villanueva today.

The items we talked about were:

1. Overhead Study – This was kicked off just recently and has Information Technology (IT) as one of the items to be studied. David told us that he would keep us apprised of what happens.
   
   
   
   


2. Informational Security - David wanted our opinion on cell phone access to County data. We admitted that it was a real problem that needed attention. David has not decided what he will do but he told us he would keep us in the loop.
   
   
   
   


3. Budget - David told us that the proposed budget would be 100 Million dollars in the red. He said that $100 Million has the COLA included, which will be 2 – 5% raise in pay starting in July 2010. And that there were no furloughs in the next fiscal year. We can only hope that the CEO Cabinet does not take away the COLA and put us on furloughs like they did this year. It would be at least in January 2010 when David and the other CEO Cabinet members would make the decisions on the budget for fiscal year 2010 to 2011.
   
   
   
   


4. IT Consolidation - This generated a lot of talk. Because the money has not come through yet to fund the study of IT Consolidation, it is still a ‘big black hole’. David said as much and he also said he may not support IT Consolidation when the study comes in. DPPA Board supported the concept of the IT Consolidation, with the understanding that if and when the IT Consolidation study gets done DPPA Board may not support all of it. The reason that David asked us for our support of the concept of the IT Consolidation was to get approval for the study. We think it would offer employees better advancement because the career paths would be better in a larger organization. If the study gets going in the next couple of months we will see if the DPPA Board still supports it.

IT Consolidation

Last week, when Logan and I had our meeting with the CIO David Villanueva, he asked us if DPPA was in favor of the IT Consolidation. I told him I would have to ask the DPPA Board in our next meeting whether they supported it. The DPPA Board meeting was a few days later and the DPPA Board Members all gave their support for IT Consolidation. If anybody does not agree with what the DPPA Board voted on the IT Consolidation, then write an email to President@dppa.org and tell me why you don’t support the plan. I would like all thoughts as we are going into this tough subject in the next few months.

 

CEO Cabinet Meeting

The DPPA Vice President in waiting, Logan Pratt and I met with the CEO, Terry Schutten; the COO, Nav Gil; the CIO, David Villanueva; Steve Keil, the Director of Labor Relations and Mark Norris, the Agency Administrator – Internal Services Agency on November 4th, 2009.

We talked about many things but the one that is important is the Budget for 2010 to 2011. Although they don’t know how bad it is going to be, they are projecting the budget to fall as much as it did this year. We are going to have another meeting in March when they should know more about what is going to happen in the next fiscal year.

They said that they look for at least two more bad years ahead because the County is always one year behind the State and it looks like the State is going to have another tough year.