By Patricia A. Scheyer
NKyTribune reporter
Park Hills city council met virtually Monday night in a caucus meeting to discuss the budget and the Open Gov program.
Mayor Kathy Zembrodt brought up the fact that she looked into who visited OpenGov.com for the city of Park Hills in the last three months, and she found out that there were only 9 hits.
“There was only one hit from Park Hills,” said Zembrodt. “Others were from all over the country.”
She asked the council if it was time to consider getting rid of Open Gov and using the $3,000 a year for something else in the city.
Councilmember Pam Spoor agreed.
“It doesn’t seem to work for our residents,” she said.
Councilmember Sarah Froelich agreed, saying that the site is as good as the information that is entered into it. She concurred that the site doesn’t get a lot of visits, and speculated that it could be time to move on and work on ways to make things more visible.
The conversation centered around what the city could do to get the word out if they were to eliminate Open Gov. Spoor suggested that they could do an email newsletter, similar to what Ft Mitchell is doing, but then said it would require gathering emails.
Councilmember Dr. Joe Daugherty liked the idea but reminded the council that many residents still don’t rely on computers and don’t have emails.
Mayor Zembrodt said that when they first got the program, city Clerk Julie Alig worked with officials of the program, and the police at first wanted to participate and enter information onto the site. But over the years, when Lieutenant Richard Webster realized how few people look at the site, he felt that he was wasting his time.
Spoor said they do send out a newsletter by mail quarterly, but she talked about the possibility of doing a virtual newsletter more often.
Froelich told council members that they could do a page link out from the police department, or out from the main website to link to the hottest topics that they want the residents to see.
Spoor said she would look into what other sister cities are doing about getting information out, and she said they need to look into how to acquire email addresses so that they could do email newsletters. Froelich said they could coordinate with the Civic Association to help with email addresses.
Mayor Zembrodt told council members that if they were able to save the money, they would have to discuss what to do with the money.
Open Gov is a software program billed as a way to power a more effective and accountable government. it touts leveraging best practice standards for data protection, platform infrastructure, and user access to protect from hacking, ransomware and fraud. It is a centralized, integrated system run by staff with over 500 years of collective government experience so that it can ensure success before, during and after implementation.
The majority of cities in Northern Kentucky have some form of Open gov. In many of the cities, the program works well, but as with any program, a one size fits all approach does not actually fit all, which is the message Mayor Zembrodt wanted to emphasize to the council.