ADMINISTRATIVE COMMITTEE MEETING
3.	CONSIDER EXPENDITURE OF BUDGETED FUNDS FOR AMENDMENT TO DATABASE PROGRAMMING CONTRACT TO ACCOMMODATE CHANGES FOR ORDINANCE NO. 139 IMPLEMENTATION AND FUNCTIONALITY IMPROVEMENTS
Meeting Date:		July 14, 2009	Budgeted: Yes
From:		Darby Fuerst,	Program/	Conservation
		General Manager	Line Item No.:	6-7811.80
Prepared By:		Stephanie Pintar and Inder Osahan	Cost Estimate:	$29,300
General Counsel Approval: N/A
Committee Recommendation: The Administrative Committee reviewed this item on July 14, 2009 and recommended _________________.
CEQA Compliance: N/A

SUMMARY: Staff is requesting authorization to spend budgeted funds to address computer programming needs related to Ordinance No. 139, “Amending the Rebate Program to Disallow Both a Rebate and Water Credit for a Single Qualifying Device”. Ordinance No. 139 was adopted on May 21, 2009 and was effective July 1, 2009. Upon adoption of the ordinance, staff determined that modifications to the new database were needed to implement the ordinance. Implementation of Ordinance No. 139 requires modifications to the Rebate, Permit, Water Use Credit, Accounts Receivable and Water Credit Transfer modules of the new database. The Ordinance requires a surcharge in the amount of any previous rebate for a fixture when a Water Use Credit or On-Site Credit from that fixture is used on a Water Permit. The surcharge is deposited in the Rebate fund to help support future rebates and permanent conservation savings. Attached as Exhibit 3-A is a Statement of Work from Zone 24X7 that details the tasks to be completed at a cost of $12,700. In addition to the Ordinance 139 modifications, staff has identified new requirements that will enhance the overall system functionality and ease of use. It was anticipated that these types of additional changes would be required after staff had a chance to test the new database system. The estimated cost of these additional changes is $16,600 (a detailed task list is being developed and will be distributed at the Administrative Committee meeting). The Staff is requesting authorization for a not-to-exceed amount of $29,300 for these two projects. Funds were included in the Fiscal Year 2009-10 budget in anticipation of programming changes and maintenance of the database. The new database is currently undergoing its final testing and staff training in anticipation of a full launch in August 2009.

RECOMMENDATION: Staff recommends the Board authorize expenditure of funds in an amount not-to-exceed $29,300 for programming to accommodate changes for Ordinance No. 139 implementation and functionality improvements. The Administrative Committee reviewed this item on July 14, 2009 and voted _ to _ recommend ___________.

IMPACT TO STAFF/RESOURCES: The Fiscal Year 2009-10 budget includes $30,000 for modifications to the Water Demand Division database. Without these proposed modifications to the database for Ordinance No. 139, staff would have to manually process all rebates. Manual rebate processing impacts the Water Demand Division staff, accounting and support services staff. Upon completion of the Ordinance 139 changes, the additional changes would also be done so that staff could use the system error free.

BACKGROUND: In April 2004, staff began work on the new Water Demand Database System. In June 2008 staff finished accumulating detailed requirements in order to get the programming completed for the new web based application for processing permits, conservation tracking, rebates and other water demand functions. Staff has now determined that additional changes are required for Ordinance No. 139 implementation and other functionality improvements. The new database is currently undergoing its final testing and staff training in anticipation of a full launch in August 2009.

Once the programming is completed, there would be a need to have all the documents digitized using the scanning technologies available today. This will enable fast retrieval of the documents electronically and also allow staff to respond to customer requests in a timely manner. The document scanning effort will need to be outsourced to get all of the documents in the file cabinets in Water Demand Division digitized and made available to staff. Currently, staff is researching the scanning component and will seek funding when the analysis is completed. It is anticipated that the scanning could take anywhere between six months to a year to be completed.

Also, when the new database system is rolled out, there will be no data in it. All of the old legacy dos-based data for permits, conservation and rebates will have to be transferred into this new database to be able to use it for queries. Data transferred will then need to be cleaned up to match the new fields so that logical and accurate reports can be generated. Staff has been training on the new water demand database system with some dummied up datasets and viewing the results from the system, but the old legacy data needs to be transferred and corrected in a reasonable time frame so that the staff and the public can begin to reap the benefits of the new system. This is referred to as data mining and the mining effort itself can be a very tedious and time consuming effort as the data has to go through the quality control and assurance for accuracy. Staff is researching various options for the data mining effort required to correctly populate the data. After assessing the data mining needs staff will also seek funding for this effort. It is estimated that the data mining can occur in parallel to the scanning of the paper documents and could take from ten months to two years to complete. In addition to getting the old legacy data uploaded, it is important to get the missing data for inspections (on paper) and parcel information (coming as an electronic file) into the new database. This is a simple data entry effort where a user will enter data into a computer by reviewing the paper document. In our case, this paper document would have been scanned into the document management system as a PDF (electronic) format.

EXHIBITS

3-A Statement of Work from Zone 24X7

U:\staff\word\committees\Admin\2009\20090714\03\item3.doc