Streamline Blog

I want to share a story from the Carmel Area Wastewater District - a story that highlights the amazing work special districts do behind the scenes, as well as the great job they’ve done sharing critical information with the public during the covid crisis.

Twain Harte CSD plays a big role in their community by providing a variety of essential services, however finding an efficient way to communicate with the public wasn’t always easy. While they had a website built by consultants on a free platform, it was so challenging to use that no one at the district could make changes. The result was only the most basic information was posted, the formatting was always a mess, and website usage suffered. This was particularly painful during emergency events, like droughts and wildfires, when staff were then required to handle a large number of phone calls and walk-in inquiries, host community meetings, and send costly mailers.

Streamline is the only company in the world building online tools just for special districts. Why is that?

Recovery is defined as the actions taken to return the community to normal following a disaster. Repairing, replacing, or rebuilding property are examples of recovery.

The need for special districts to plan for unforeseen events has become more obvious than ever before. Whether it’s a threat from a pandemic that forces people to work from home, a catastrophic fire that wipes out entire towns, or the possibility of riots and looting that may affect your ability to operate, special districts need to be ready to face the unknown.

Response is defined as the actions taken to save lives and prevent further damage in a disaster or emergency situation. Response is putting preparedness plans into action. Response activities may include damage assessment, search and rescue, fire fighting and sheltering victims.

Preparedness takes the form of plans or procedures designed to save lives and to minimize damage when an emergency occurs. This is a continuous cycle of planning, organizing, training, equipping, exercising, evaluation and improvement activities to ensure effective coordination and the enhancement of capabilities to prevent, protect against, respond to, recover from and mitigate the effects of natural disasters, acts of terrorism and other man-made disasters. These activities ensure that when a disaster strikes, emergency managers will be able to provide the best response possible.

In this post we’ll go over the basics of the mitigation phase and share resources to help you perform a Risk Assessment for your district. This may sound like a big complicated topic, but we're going to walk you through it step by step. We even have a template you can use to complete phase 1.

In today's Going Paperless webinar, we discussed a variety of tools that can enable special districts to collaborate and work remotely. We covered cloud-based systems for communication, meetings, project management, and more.

Learning technology can be such a long and dedicated process that it’s easy to assume everyone has the same knowledge you do. Things that a lot of techy folks think are basic might in fact be known by only a lucky few. From things like shortcuts that make browsing the internet easier, to how to select and manipulate large amounts of files at once, to “hidden” computing features like copy/paste. These tricks and tips aren’t obvious, but are really helpful for technology users to know.