SOLUTIONS Case Studies

City of Fort Worth, Texas

The City of Fort Worth is growing…fast. According to the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, this 19th largest city in the U.S. boasts a population of approximately 686,850, adding a whopping 22,750 new residents in 2006. This growth is significant – in fact, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington is the second fastest growing metro area in the U.S.

To keep up with the city’s growth and plan for the future, the City of Forth Worth updates its Comprehensive Plan every year, something other cities do every five years. This plan requires a dedicated staff and almost an entire year to manage, update, edit and publish. With edits coming from every department, stakeholder feedback and citizen comments, the task is daunting. In order to give internal departments and external stakeholders the opportunity to provide feedback, each draft is printed and distributed, resulting in printing fees upwards of $8,000.  A copy is presented to local organizations and stakeholders, other City departments, the City manager’s office and the library. In recent years, the City made the 350 page plan available for download on the Web. But, in order to make this accessible, it had to be cut into chapters and posted as PDFs. The trouble? Every time a change was made to the document, the download process was repeated, resulting in approximately 20 hours to maintain the most up-to-date documents available to the public. 

In addition to the mere number of drafts and the logistical task of managing them, the concern over accuracy started to grow. “Our department was always trying to figure out who the main editor was, juggling graphics back and forth,” commented Chris Kerzman, IT Business Coordinator, Planning and Development Department.  “I can remember what a serious issue it was when two maps were transposed within a published document. Since maps and other graphics are a core component to our Comprehensive Plan we needed to make sure this did not happen again.”

The City also wanted to increase the involvement of their citizens in the Comprehensive Plan, but their current method of receiving feedback was limited to paper comment cards handed out at public meetings. The comment cards were accepted, entered in a database and then analyzed. This was an arduous process, considering the department collected over 200 comment cards a year. By the time the comments made it to the directed department or manager, weeks had passed. The lag time made it difficult to respond to and incorporate feedback in a timely manner.

Fort Worth needed a way to make it easier to provide input on the plan, cut costs of printing it and reduce the number of man-hours required to update the plan yearly.

"We are committed to making our data more accurate, more accessible to staff and citizens, and making it more readily available and useful."

Chris Kerzman,IT Business Coordinator - City of Fort Worth,Department of Planning & Development

Another pain was an internal process surrounding the creation of the monthly Zoning case dockets. The Planning and Development Department faced an average of 30 zoning cases a month and each case is assigned a case manager. These managers had to facilitate their own document creation, incorporating text, feedback, maps and aerial photos – and it required the use of many different programs including GIS (Geographic Information System) and Microsoft Word. In the end, one editor was tasked with inputting and publishing the data for all 30 cases. The team needed to find a way to ease the complexity of this process and the time spent doing it, while at the same time publishing a professional document.

Enter Limehouse

Realizing the need, a colleague from the City of Fort Worth Planning and Development Department witnessed a demonstration of Limehouse Software at the Texas American Planning Association Conference in 2006 and immediately brought it back to Kerzman for further review.

The City of Forth Worth sought a program that would allow them to receive public comments, analyze data, publish consistent documents and share information with interested parties. They found this blend in the tools from Limehouse Software.

It was the simple benefits like automatic formatting and pagination, indexing and single source publishing that would really make a difference in the day to day for the City of Fort Worth.

The City implemented Limehouse Software in April 2007 and after only two weeks, the programs were fully implemented and ready to use. The training experience went beyond expectations: in just one day five employees were trained on the software. The manual was easy and intuitive and Limehouse support was readily available for follow-up questions and additional training.

The Future with Limehouse

So far, the City has tested an online posting of a proposed Noise Attenuation Ordinance for public feedback.  http://consultation.limehousesoftware.com/fortworthgov/drafts/2/index.html

The next effort with Limehouse will be to post internal zoning documents that one editor can manage and publish without the headache of integrating many different formats and versions.By using Limehouse, the data will reside in one central warehouse and the publishing tools will enable the editor to create one cohesive document that is professionally laid out and ready for printing. Limehouse can also archive documents so they can be referenced in the future.

The Planning & Development Department also looks forward to utilizing Limehouse for its #1 headache, the Comprehensive Plan.

“One of the true benefits of Limehouse Software is its ability to accept comments from staff, stakeholders and citizens in a Web-enabled environment and attribute those comments to a very specific part of the plan. This allows us to take action in sensitive areas, pinpoint the concern, address it with the appropriate department and incorporate this feedback into the plan,” stated Kerzman.The City will also benefit from a decrease in man-hours as keeping the plan updated and edited will be consolidated with Limehouse. In addition, because they can share drafts digitally prior to printing the final Comprehensive Plan, the City will notice a decline in printing costs.

The City of Fort Worth’s future plans using Limehouse include:

The City of Fort Worth and Kerzman have high hopes for what the Limehouse implementation can do for the Planning and Development Department, stating, “First and foremost, our goal for Limehouse in our department is to save time. If we can lessen the number of hours we spend editing, lessen the number of hours we spend trying to make a document public, lessen the time we spend trying to input and analyze feedback from stakeholders, then it is a win.”