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July / August 2010
Volume 22, Number 4

News you can use

10 Counties Earn Best Practices Awards

The TAC Leadership Foundation will honor 10 counties with Best Practices Awards this year during the TAC Annual Conference in September.

The Best Practices Awards Program honors counties for their outstanding achievements, exceptional delivery of services and superior innovations; the goal is to inspire local officials to work toward improved governance and solutions, and create model programs that address local government challenges in ways that can be replicated in counties throughout the state.

Programs earning an Achievement Award in 2010 include:

• Webb County’s Jail Intelligence Unit, which has worked to avert a murder plot at a prison facility and has provided intelligence on gang communications and hierarchy. The Unit has compiled more than 85 reports since its formation.
  
  
• Smith County’s Compensatory Time Management Program, which was organized to reduce the ever-increasing and costly payout and accrual of employee- earned compensatory time. The program has helped the sheriff’s department reduce its compensatory time by more than 48 percent.
  
  
• Houston County’s Youth and Communities Program, which provided summer employment for 30 at-risk youth. The youth helped restore historic cemeteries, improve public property and expand the county’s senior services.

Programs earning a Delivery of Services Award include:

• Williamson County’s ACH Payment Program, an automatic payment system for the county’s 23,000 taxpayers who are 65 years old or disabled. To implement the program, the county tax assessor-collector had to create spreadsheets, adopt a verification process, and work with the treasurer, area banks and other stakeholders.
  
  
• Tarrant County’s Northeast Newsletter, a bimonthly electronic newsletter promoting county services that is emailed to residents and businesses.
  
  
• Madison County’s One Day 4-H Courthouse Square Revitalization Program, which put the county’s 4-H youth to work. The kids spent one day planting flowers, spreading mulch, shining windows, picking up trash, scraping paint and performing other services, all to get the square ready for the county’s Mushroom Festival.

• Tarrant County’s Strategic Coordination/ Policy-Driven Jail Population Control Program, which created a system- wide, team-based, results-oriented approach to managing the county’s criminal justice system.
  
  
• Bee County’s Volunteer Services Hours Program, which saved the county $20,000 in 2009 by giving volunteers on-the-job training and allowing volunteers to perform certain vital tasks related to the courts system and other county services. Volunteers became educated about the importance of county government and community service and learned new job skills.
  
  
• Taylor County’s Jail Diversion Program, which sought to identify and treat the region’s mental health offenders. The county teamed up with sheriffs, commissioners, district attorneys, district judges, probation departments, mental health services and other stakeholders in Jones, Callahan, Stephens and Shackelford counties to form a task force, then hired a Jail Diversion Coordinator.
  
  
• Bexar County’s Lady Justice Foundation Restoration Project, which included the renovation of the county’s main plaza and historic water fountain; the fountain had been removed in the mid 1920s due to the county’s growth. In restoring the plaza to its historic condition, the county took extra steps to conserve water, designing the fountain in a way that would recapture condensate water from the county’s air conditioning system.

Each county will be formally presented with awards during a special event at TAC’s Annual Conference, as well as during a local commissioners court meeting. Additionally, a video of each program will be created and placed on the Web for use on county Websites, cable TV channels and other platforms, and more information about each program will be available in a future edition of County magazine.