By CASSANDRA SHOFAR

Staff Writer

MEDINA — Whether it’s getting on the same network, changing the utility bill envelopes or cutting costs through attrition, bit by bit the city is chipping away at the long list of recommendations from its 2007 efficiency study.

A position from the Medina Community Recreation Center was not replaced, saving the city roughly $74,500 this year, and a clerk position in the city was eliminated through attrition, saving the city $59,700, Mayor Jane Leaver said, adding there are several retirements coming up and their positions won’t be filled.

The city also made room in its budget for a human resources position, which will be hired by the beginning of next year, Leaver said, adding salary along with job description details still need to be worked out.

“I would have liked to have had this position filled right now … but there’ve been several time-consuming projects so far this year that have delayed this process,” Leaver said. “I would anticipate being ready to hire around the first of the year.”

In addition, city hall offices are finally on a computer network, allowing it to operate more effectively and smoothly, said police officer Darin Zaremba, who added this is only the first step to a long-term goal of getting all city hall offices and departments — law, fire, recreation center and city garage — on one central network and e-mail server.

The city hall network allows workers to share files more efficiently, have remote access from home, and eventually, when all the entities are on one server, employees from the water treatment plant, for example, won’t have to drive to city hall or call to access information on the computer, Zaremba said.

“We’d rather put that info at the tips of their hands,” he said. “That’s not efficient having people driving around to get information.”

He added with a joint IT department composed of him and Noble Knights Networking Inc., people in the city and police department, which has its own network, now have someone to go to.

“Before, there wasn’t anyone to take care of anything,” he said. “Now they’ve got an IT department … so if any issues come up or if anything goes down … they have someone to go to.”

Finance Director Keith Dirham said they’ve also managed to save the city $7,344 a year just in changing the type of envelopes the city’s utility bills are delivered in to a cheaper, bigger style.

“The stub on the new bill is on the bottom instead of the top,” he added, explaining these are OCR (optical character recognition) machine-friendly.

The OCR machine, which the city plans to purchase by the fall, will take hours and hours of manual work off the finance department’s plate, Dirham said.

“It will read the stubs, read the checks, post the payments to our software system and then send the deposit to the bank with an image of the check,” he said, explaining it’s now all done manually in what’s called a batch process.

“There’s a lot of potential for human error in the batch process,” he said. “The machine will eliminate that and it will also give us a better record of what payments have come in because we’ll have an image of the check. And it’s a lot faster.”

Shofar may be reached at 330-721-4044 or cshofar@ohio.net.