Focus On: City of Allen, Texas

Allen, Texas is a city of over 55,000 located in Collin County in North Texas, about 20 miles north of Dallas on US highway 75. Allen has experienced rapid growth in the past decade, more than doubling its population since the 1990 census. Today that growth continues, with the City issuing residential and commercial building permits at a rapid rate. The city’s early history begins with a land grant by the Republic of Texas to the Texas Emigration and Land Company in the 1840’s, which began attracting Immigrants of European descent into the area. The original township of Allen was laid out by a predecessor of the Southern Pacific railroad in 1872. Five years later, in 1878, Allen became the site of the first train robbery in Texas when Sam Bass and his associates pillaged the train. Following the closure of the Interurban railroad line in 1948, Allen’s population declined to only 400 citizens in the 1950 census. However, the construction of US highway 75 in 1960 began a period of growth for the city. The relocation of Developmental Learning Materials, an educational publisher, and InteCom Inc. to Allen in the late 1980’s, led the way for further corporate relocations and business start-ups throughout the 1990’s, resulting in continuing strong growth during the 1990’s. By 2000, the City’s growing volume of records, resulting from a decade of rapid growth, pointed to the need for improving the process for managing these records. In early 2001, the City had outgrown its off-site records center and moved into the basement in the new City Hall. The City used a manual records management system throughout the 1990’s, with individual departments largely responsible for their own records. After reviewing several options, the City selected and licensed Intersects‘ retention schedule development and records management software. The City established a central records management function to use the Intersect software to create and maintain a records control schedule for the City, and to maintain a central records database for all City records. Ms. Shelley B. George, Assistant City Secretary and Records Coordinator for the city of Allen, was responsible for planning and implementing the city’s expanded records management program. Ms. George said “People here have been very receptive to the new records management system. Locating and entering our stored records into the database has helped departments identify what they have, and we have been able to identify the types of records and verify and assign retention periods. “In past years, departments were responsible for their own records, and when they thought a container was eligible to be destroyed, they would notify us for approval. However, in many instances, persons who originally put records in storage are not here any longer, and it was sometimes difficult to track records.

“Reviewing all of our records in storage, identifying the department to which they belong, checking the types of records, and assigning a destroy date, has tightened up our records operation. Once records containers are entered into the software database, departments know what they have – and we can quickly locate records when they are needed. We can also accurately track and observe retention requirements.” A function of Intersect’s Retention Schedule Manager software allows sub-schedules to be created for different departments once a central control schedule has been developed. A Retention Control Schedule for a small city can contain hundreds of record series titles, and run to a hundred pages or more; producing a sub-schedule for each department provides a much shorter and easily manageable list to individual departments, consisting only of those records for which a department is responsible. Most departmental schedules typically run to less than a dozen pages. “We have used the Intersect software’s capability to produce individual schedules for each department,” Ms. George said. “With the departmental sub-schedules, each department knows exactly which records they are responsible for, where they are located, and what the retention periods are.”  The city also recently acquired a document shredder, and uses the shredder to shred confidential documents in-house when the retention requirements have been met. “We’ve found this to be cost effective in terms of time and dollars,” Ms. George said. “This past year, our City’s waste disposal vendor assisted us in destroying our eligible open records through their recycling plant and will continue to provide this service on an annual basis.”  Intersect Systems offers two- and three-year payment terms with no interest or penalty for its records management software applications, which often helps local governments fit software costs into budgets. The city of Allen took advantage of a two-year pay-out option. Ms. George noted that “Intersect’s two-year payment option helped us fit the price of the software into our city budget, spreading the license price over two years.”  Ms. George’s office is located in the Allen City Hall at the Allen Civic Plaza, 305 Century Parkway in Allen. She can be reached at (972) 727-0106, or by e-mail at sgeorge@ci.allen.tx.us.