Town Government in Wrentham Needs to Modernize

The Wrentham Town Government Study Committee shared its findings with the Board of Selectmen on Tuesday. While Wrentham got good marks, there’s always room for improvement.

The TGSC was formed last year to rate the efficiency of and offer recommendations for Wrentham’s government. A few months ago, the committee put out a survey, and 95-percent of the citizens who responded said they were satisfied with the government.

Jerry McGovern said in many areas Wrentham’s governing bodies are doing very well, but in some areas Wrentham is very behind the times.

“A lot of things are not much different than they were in 1962,” he said.

McGovern said the town’s departments work well in their own spheres, but when all departments have to work together on a specific goal, that’s where it can get tricky.

McGovern specified this did not apply to the police, fire and department of public works.

He said most resources are managed with little to no integration across town. He said a factor in this is the fact that processes and workflows are still paper based, and therefore harder to access, both by the public and the government.

“ Those are things we still have to improve upon,” he said.

Going digital is what McGovern recommended, but he said it will be a long process. One of the reasons he said was the fact that there’s no standardization of technology equipment throughout the departments, and much of what is there is very outdated.

“I send stuff to the town and I have to downgrade the file because they only have 1998 Word,” he said.

McGovern recommended that a gradual upgrade is necessary in order to standardize tech in the building, modernize government processes and implement new software to better serve the community.

Two of these software programs he recommended included People Forms and publish/subscribe capability.

The publish/subscribe capability would allow residents and government employees/volunteers (all 120 volunteers) to subscribe to the types of information they require, rather than searching hundreds of documents.

He said this would allow residents to be more informed and departments to be more integrated, through standardization and regulation of necessary information.