After 4 years of blindly following Torpey, BOT finally stands up and gets a Torpey Temper Tantrum

levisonhw

Apr 20, 2015 at 6:04am

In most cases we do. There are other issues such as signatures. Currently e-signature is not an accepted technically something that we are trying to change. Some original documents are in paper which are scanned using OCR and stored in a TIFF format - this should make them searchable.

We are also discussing assigning meta data to documents.

cramer

Apr 20, 2015 at 6:08am

Howard - The budgets up to 2013 broke down legal expenses into two categories: salaries and wages (the retainer) and other expenses (the billable hours.) Beginning with the 2013 budget, there is only one category under Legal expenses and costs, "other expenses," which combines the two. Why was this change made? Maplewood uses the two categories, salaries and wages for the retainer, and other expenses for the billable hours.

Thanks. I appreciate your contributions to this forum.

levisonhw

Apr 20, 2015 at 6:31am

Pension reform eliminated counsel expense being paid as wage & salary. Currently the retainer is $5K/month. The legal expense includes a number of legal professional services.

scottgreenstone

Apr 20, 2015 at 6:35am

So we pay them $60k per year, yet they billed over $250,000 in 2014? Wowsers.

cramer

Apr 20, 2015 at 6:45am

Howard - Does the "other expenses" category include all of the special counsels, such as redevelopment attorney, bond counsel etc.?
In some years, the amounts actually paid have been substantially higher than the budget amount. This of course shows up in the budget for the following year. For instance, the budget amount for other expenses in 2010 was $256,597 and the actual amount was $602,575. As a suggestion, it might be helpful if the reason for the difference between budgeted and actual be included in the explanation of the budget changes in the following year.

levisonhw

Apr 20, 2015 at 7:14am

Cramer:

There are special cases where legal professional expenses are charged to different accounts - i.e. development escrow accounts and included as part of the bond issue financing. Barry typically discusses large variances in his budget narrative and highlights those items in his spreadsheet.

levisonhw said:
In most cases we do. There are other issues such as signatures. Currently e-signature is not an accepted technically something that we are trying to change. Some original documents are in paper which are scanned using OCR and stored in a TIFF format - this should make them searchable.

None of these examples are relevant for the resolution raised by @Transparent, which was a standard in-house created document that should have been created electronically and made searchable.

http://southorange.no-ip.org/weblink8/0/doc/133626/Page1.aspx