RM of La Broquerie council

Council for the Rural Municipality of La Broquerie is considering going paperless. "People have been talking about the paperless world for the last thirty years," says Reeve Claude Lussier. "Maybe the RM will come to speed on that."

Lussier says from a government standpoint, whether municipal, provincial or federal, everybody is going to a paperless world. "We're looking at perhaps revamping our system here and maybe going towards having laptop computers for the councillors at meetings."

"We're looking at it from a cost point of view," says Lussier. He notes several other municipalities are doing this but are providing it at a fairly expensive price per councillor. "We're trying to look for a method that is as cheap as possible and most efficient," he says. "The bottom line on this is that we want to be able to reduce the amount of paper but also reduce the amount of time staff has to prepare for council meetings."

Lussier suggests becoming paperless, could cost the municipality between $3,500-$5,000 to get a complete system in place. "That's a one shot deal," says Lussier. "Hypothetically with upgrades on laptops we're looking at maybe five hundred dollars cost per year after that. But we'll save more than half that cost just in paper over the next year."