The Tools We Use, The Service We Expect & The Return We Deserve On Our Investment

What's the big deal about a website, and why should it matter to you what email Boro workers use? Simply put, these are the two most important issues that can be addressed today to make our municipal operations more cost effective, more efficient, and increase the return on investment of our Boro residents. If we take the analogy of the Boro as a business, the municipal website if properly crafted and executed could be the single most powerful tool in service to the public. After all, the Boro's primary function and responsibility is to provide the service for our community that we can not provide for ourselves as individuals. These services like our own heartbeats or breathing are vital and ever-present but tend to go unnoticed, and like our internal functions that cause illness and damage when they don't function optimally, our internal Boro functions create their own chronic symptoms and dysfunction when they aren't properly attended. A multifaceted municipal website minimizes the wasted time and effort of residents who want information and services to be easy, as they should be. An integrated website allows Boro offices to communicate internally and with the public quickly and efficiently. Just as business enterprises have already proven, online information, services and conveniences once adopted are indispensable.
Equally if not more so, our Boro email, or in a broader/truer sense our Boro operations platform, is the foundation upon which modern operations are built. Anyone in business or other ventures that has tasted the power and potential of a system such as Google Apps understands that it is the difference between the telegraph and fiber optics, between the Bronze Age and 3-D printing. The tools readily available, the tools that can be created, the speed and simplicity with which to communicate, create, and devise instruments seems to me what it must have been like at the dawn of the printing press, radio, television, or the home PC.
For a combined cost that amounts to half of an average salary we can save multiple future salaries for workers doing things "the old fashioned way", and produce savings that will pay dividends by treating the system, not the symptom. If we are agreed as a community of the level of  services we expect from our municipal offices than we should also be agreed to demand that our money, our investment, yield the greatest possible effect and return.