Agenda - 05-15-2014 - 5 - Laserfiche WebLink

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7 Attachment B Prepared 050814 15. don't want staff to be intimidated by commissioners — if team includes commissioners, have effort be staff directed and not commissioner directed 16. for the communications team, "one Commissioner is not enough, two is good" DEPARTMENTAL ROLES: Most respondents seemed to settle on the view that the Public Information function should report to the County Manager. Several mentioned the importance, however, of having effective coordination between the Manager, Public Affairs, the Clerk, and the Board. There appears to be a lack of understanding about the roles and responsibilities of the Public Affairs Officer. Several observers noted that this may be attributable to having created a position before having an approved communications plan in place. If the Board decides to proceed with developing a countywide Plan, that may provide an opportunity to redefine the roles of the Public Information Officer (PIO) to fit with the Plan that is specifically adopted by the County. I believe it would be quite beneficial if the Board and all staff can develop a common understanding of the responsibilities of the PIO. The most common theme I heard regarding public outreach by individual departments is that those departments need to have considerable autonomy to carry out their public information responsibilities based on their professional competencies, while adhering to a set of overarching principles and standards established in a Board adopted Plan. 1. do not want to make a plan on how a given department gets its information out; that needs to coordinate with our overall message 2. don't want to micromanage how departments get their information out unless it's not working — that's why you would have quarterly updates 3. when it comes time to communicate with citizens, we need the help of our PIO 4. important for the new manager to be part of this process so they'll be able to feel more ownership 5. PIO should not control departments; departments must have flexibility because what they do is so dramatically different — one person cannot know all that; a standard policy will squelch innovation from some of the departments 6. would be individual department responsibility to adhere to broad standards with some flexibility on how they implement 7. need to identify the role of PIO in emergency situations 8. there should be a phone number for central information dissemination, answered either by a human or by a machine that doesn't ask a lot of questions 9. need to have chain -of- command clearly understood 10. could retool the role of the PIO to make sense with the plan we're going to implement 11. communications team should go to all departments regardless of whether they have specialists and see what they want to see in this plan LESSONS LEARNED: There was considerable concern expressed by most Commissioners that in a number of recent severe weather situations, the County has not been proactive or effective in disseminating timely, accurate, and helpful information to audiences needing that information. The existing County website is widely viewed as being severely flawed, cumbersome and not particularly intuitive, and not very "public- friendly ". Several Commissioners and staff cited the positive impacts on communication to and from the public from using Twitter and Facebook (e.g. live tweeting from Board of Health meetings) — some others acknowledged benefits while expressing some concerns about potential drawbacks as well. 1. "if you're following the Board of Health tweeting you actually feel like you're in the meeting" 2. we should always be ahead of our communications 3. we shouldn't allow the media to be introducing our topics to the public —that's our job