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The City of La Quinta- Laser-Focused
on Resident Services
The City of La Quinta is a notable example of GaaS (Government as a Service.) Led by their Clerk, Monika Radeva, the City digitized its records, automated its workflow processes, and set up a self-service records portal for developers, planners, builders, and residents, called The Hub. In this webinar, Ms. Radeva illustrates their implementation of Laserfiche and gives some great tips, dos, and don’ts, and lessons learned
What You Will Learn
This overview explores the City of La Quinta’s successful transition into a "Government as a Service" model, a digital transformation sparked by the economic necessity of the 2008 recession. To maintain high-quality resident services despite a 25% workforce reduction, the city dismantled traditional departmental silos to create "The Hub," a physical and digital one-stop shop for permits, planning, and engineering. Central to this strategy is the implementation of Laserfiche, a "trusted system" that serves as the city's enterprise system of record.
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By digitizing decades of paper records—including building permits, architectural plans, and engineering archives—the city has empowered its constituents through a 24/7 self-service web portal. This portal features custom search forms that allow users to find records via addresses, project names, or even major commercial tenants. This initiative has significantly increased transparency and efficiency; while formal public records requests doubled during the pandemic, the online portal now handles over 200 search sessions per day, effectively preempting a massive volume of manual administrative work and providing residents with immediate access to information from the comfort of their homes.
FAQ
What is the concept of "Government as a Service" as applied by La Quinta?
It represents an evolution from siloed, independent departmental functions to a centralized, integrated platform that offers residents a "one-stop shop" experience for all municipal interactions.
What challenges led La Quinta to prioritize technology and innovation?
Following the 2007–2008 housing market recession, the city faced:
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The dissolution of redevelopment agencies (loss of substantial revenue).
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A 25% reduction in workforce (2013).
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The loss of a long-time City Manager. The city needed to provide the same level of service with significantly fewer fiscal and staffing resources.
What is "The Hub," and how does it function?
The Hub is a customer service center that physically co-locates building, planning, and engineering staff. It utilizes a unified permitting software (Trackit) so residents can visit a single counter for all project needs, including integrated payment processing.
How does the city balance public transparency with the protection of proprietary information?
The city uses a two-tiered system:
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Desktop Client (Internal): Used by the Clerk’s office to maintain the repository. It contains only permanent records (no temporary files).
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WebLink Portal (Public/Staff): A user-friendly landing page where the public can search for records.
What specific search features were added to help users find planning records for shopping centers?
Because users may not know the official development name, the city added "major tenants" (e.g., Smart and Final) to the metadata, allowing residents to find sign programs and specific plans by searching for well-known businesses.
Why was the engineering archive moved from the city's website to Laserfiche?
The previous web search tool allowed users to look directly into city servers, creating a cybersecurity risk. Moving the archive to Laserfiche provided a secured, independent environment that isolated the records from the city's internal network.
How has the digitization of records impacted the workload of the City Clerk’s office?
By making records available at their fingertips, the Clerk's office can fulfill requests independently without forwarding them to other departments. This was critical as records request volumes doubled over the last few years.
What metric demonstrates the success of the self-service web portal?
The portal handles over 200 sessions per day. This high volume of independent user searching suggests that the system prevents hundreds of formal, manual records requests from being filed daily.
