City ordinances to hit the web
By Nathan Straus News Reporter

The Chandler City Council meeting December 11 was dominated by talk of bringing city ordinances into the modern age. Specifically, the council voted to take necessary measures to put Chandler city ordinances online for easy viewing.

Jim Moffeit, City of Chandler administrator, said most cities put ordinances online, particularly larger and more progressive cities.

In preparation for online viewing the city will have its ordinances re-codified. To this end the Franklin Legal Publishing company will be hired by the city for $8,450 to handle the re-codification.

"We need the ordinances recodified because it hasn't been done in a while," Moffeit said. "It was last done in 2001 and it needs to be done every 10 years."

Moffeit said the process needs to happen before the ordinances go online, so having the ordinances re-codified now would "kill two birds with one stone", allowing the city to put ordinances online while getting re-codification out of the way, even though the ordinances wouldn't need to be re-codified until 2011.

The process of re-codification and posting the ordinances online, Moffeit said, would not be complete for eight or nine months.

"It's a fairly intense process, " Moffeit said. "We do a full review of our ordinances and check to see if there are any that need to be changed."

Once the process is complete and everything is online, Moffeit said the ordinances will be digitized into a disk, and someone will be able to edit and supplement the ordinances as the city makes updates and adds more. In addition, the updated version will be available on print as well for those without internet access.

There were a few other items on the Chandler City Council agenda. One concerned an ordinance allowing the city to collect fees, fines, court costs and other such charges via credit card.

The city has been accepting fee payments by credit card since around June, but it was discovered Chandler needs an ordinance allowing this, Moffeit said. Because of this, the council approved such an ordinance.

Finally, an investment policy was approved for the city during the meeting.

Moffeit also said going over the investment policy is an annual necessity. The policy currently allows the City of Chandler to invest in money market accounts or certificates of deposit.