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When it comes to keeping track of highway maintenance work electronically, all roads lead to Columbia County. Starting Monday, Columbia County’s highway department will go live with a new computer-based system designed to keep precise records of exactly what kind of work each employee does, how long it takes, which roads are being maintained, which pieces of equipment were used - even how many pounds of salt were poured onto a snowy road.

Highway Commissioner Tom Lorfeld said that, to his knowledge, no other county highway department in Wisconsin has such a system. And it was put together locally, noted Shonna Neary, an accounting supervisor who works with the highway department.

Neary said the team that set up the system was composed of about 20 people, including representatives from county departments such as accounting and management information services, highway department supervisory employees and highway workers — some with extensive computer skills, some with little computer experience.

The County Board’s highway committee on Thursday saw a demonstration of how it will work. Much of the information that highway employees now enter by hand on paper time cards will be fed into a computer program — preferably, pretty close to the time that a particular task was completed.

The time entry application uses mostly pull-down menus, to minimize the typing that employees have to do to use it. “This was built for the ease of the employees,” Neary said.

The information in the program’s database is linked to Columbia County’s land information department, making it easy to pinpoint the exact location of a road project, and exactly what was done there — such as filling a pothole, plowing snow or cutting brush in ditches.

Much of the highway department’s work is done on roads that are under the jurisdiction of other government entities, such as towns, villages or the state. The county bills those entities for the work done by county highway crews.

In recent years, some local officials have raised concerns as to the precision of the billing, or discrepancies between initial cost estimates and the amount billed.

This program is designed, in part, to address these problems.

Highway Committee Chairman Harlan Baumgartner, who also is chairman of the town of Otsego, said that with continued use, the time entry system should establish a history that would give the highway department some indication of what a particular type of job typically costs, so that cost estimating can be more precise.

And, when towns, villages and the state get their bills from the highway department, their officials can know exactly what they’re being asked to pay for.

After employees finish filling out their records electronically, they can submit them electronically to their supervisors, who might send the record back to the employee for correction or clarification before giving it final approval.

What often happens now, Neary said, is that supervisors have to hunt down their workers’ paper time cards, which can be time-consuming. Observed County Board Chairman Andy Ross, “The advantage is not needing to schlep the cards back and forth.” And, added Lorfeld, “Everything’s legible.” Neary said she’s already received inquiries from other county highway departments about the system.

Which led to this question from highway committee member Susan Martin: Could Columbia County sell this program to other highway departments? Maybe, said Ross. In 2009, Columbia County’s land information department created, in cooperation with the MIS department, a computerised land information system. County officials gave their blessing to allow a third-party company to market the system to other counties, with Columbia County collecting a share of the proceeds of each sale.

Neary praised the MIS and land information department for their part in creating the new system. “We’ve got a very progressive county as far as computers,” she said. Added Lorfeld, “Getting this accomplished is a real pioneer effort.”

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