An e-mail exchange in April obtained by the Morgan Hill Times in
a public record request detailed the progress of a government
agency employee purchasing an Apple iPad with a Santa Clara Valley
Water District company credit card for at-large board director Cy
Mann.
An e-mail exchange in April obtained by the Morgan Hill Times in a public record request detailed the progress of a government agency employee purchasing an Apple iPad with a Santa Clara Valley Water District company credit card for at-large board director Cy Mann.
The clerk of the board Michele King updated Mann on the status of the order on April 26 as Melissa Diltz, a district employee, placed the water district’s name on a wait list to purchase a 64-gigabyte iPad three weeks after the product was released. A 64GB iPad retails for $829, not including tax.
“I have 40-something meetings a month. I gotta carry around all these binders … what I do is I have all that stuff on PDFs and put it on the iPad – it’s a lot more efficient (for) district business and informational stuff. I save the forest,” Mann said Wednesday.
Each of the seven directors at the water district are allocated $2,500 a year in discretionary funds or $17,500 total. The money is used for business-related expenditures outside the $260 each director is paid for each meeting they attend – up to 10 meetings a month – as well as travel and mileage.
Mann said the $208 he is given each month is “nothing” and he suggested the amount should be revisited. New technology is one way to the spend the money or for tickets to a charity dinner, for example, where it might be important for a director to show their support, he said.
An Apple employee at Oakridge Mall in San Jose recommended the 16GB version of the iPad if its use is only to view PDFs and not movies or to play games. The 16GB version retails for $499. He said the average PDF is a few hundred kilobytes with the largest PDF reaching one or two megabytes. A 16GB iPad can store about 16,000 PDFs.
“Sixty-four is totally unnecessary,” he said.
Mann said the reason for requesting the most advanced model was for “large files storage limitations.”
When asked about the iPad purchased on the company’s dime, CEO Beau Goldie said the district does have one iPad that he believed a director had requested.
The information technology department sometimes purchases new technology to see if it improves operations or a single version of an updated software might be bought to test before purchasing more, he said.
Goldie said the district has saved some money by extending the amount of years in between replacing the computers at the district.
