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Brainerd staff to standardize meeting packets, move away from in‑meeting board portal; council member offers to help fix website
Summary
City staff proposed standardized packet emails with download links, new laptops, and to stop using the board portal during meetings to avoid slow Wi‑Fi and large PDFs. Council member Gabe Johnson offered to assist IT with search/SEO on the city website.
City staff told the Brainerd City Council and Public Utilities Commission at their July 28 workshop that they will stop using the in‑meeting board portal and instead send an autogenerated email with a link to download meeting packets.
IT and administrative staff said that board‑portal use in chambers creates extra clicks, scalability problems on small screens and delays when packet PDFs are large. The city plans to standardize packet production across departments, encourage members to download packets before meetings and provide replacement laptops for elected officials.
“Everything is individualized,” staff said when showing the board‑portal interface, adding that scrolling on small (13‑inch) screens and clicking each PDF is cumbersome. Staff said they will format emails to include a direct link to download the packet and will meet with each packet creator to standardize formatting and size.
Council members also raised public access concerns. Several said finding the city website and agendas via search engines is difficult; one council member noted the BPU website links to the city site but that general search visibility has been inconsistent. Council member Gabe Johnson, who the mayor identified as experienced in search engine optimization, offered to meet with IT staff to improve the site’s discoverability.
On practical limits, staff said outgoing email and file transfer size constraints require splitting very large packets; the current send/receive cap discussed in the meeting is about 50 megabytes for a single transmission. Staff reiterated that bookmarked PDFs and in‑document navigation will still work once the packet is downloaded.
The city also said it will replace aging laptops for council and commissioners in August and asked members to download packets to their devices before arriving to avoid Wi‑Fi issues during meetings.
The packet and website items were presented as operational updates; the council did not take formal action beyond accepting the recommendation to standardize delivery and follow up with IT.
