Not sure whether your municipality is complying with its’ purchasing obligations or just looking for ways to be more efficient when purchasing? In this webinar, Jason Snyder will discuss the requirements that municipalities must satisfy when bidding public contracts to procure materials, equipment, and services. Mr. Snyder will also review limitations on purchases, quotes, and bids, as well as current exemptions from municipal bidding, (including DGS/COSTARS piggyback contracts). He will also discuss prevailing wage advertising and bonding requirements. The webinar will include an electronic download of the Pennsylvania Purchasing Handbook.

Does your township have shopping areas and office parks with underutilized parking areas? In Susquehanna Township, Dauphin County, drone flights over parking lots show many shopping areas and office parks are underparked, even during peak hours. While parking minimums have been standard practice in the planning world for decades, little research has been used to calculate the number of spaces actually needed per land use. This webinar will provide a review of parking requirements in general, the drone imagery collection process used by Susquehanna Township, examples of trends and changes in parking requirements, and suggestions for potential updates to your parking ordinances.

Municipalities across Pennsylvania have been inundated with record-setting rainfall and flooding. To help townships prepare and respond, the presenters in this webinar will discuss affordable options, such as localized warning systems, and the challenges that can arise when stream work is not properly designed and permitted. Participants will also learn more about the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s booklet, Guidelines for Maintaining Streams in Your Community.

This webinar will illustrate for township officials/employees and consulting engineers the importance of considering traditional and non-traditional best management practices (BMPs) that can be used to meet MS4 requirements when working with agricultural operations. Peter Vanderstappen, the State Conservation Engineer with the United States Department of Agriculture, will review examples of effective methods that can achieve your goals while avoiding expensive engineering. These simple methods will result in best management practices that are not cost-prohibitive to landowners and result in MS4 credits for your township. BMPs to be covered include concrete lots, waste management facilities, bunk silos and trails and walkways.

There are numerous reasons that a property owner does not pay municipal charges. Sometimes, the reason is because a property owner has made a conscious and unilateral decision to delay payment. This payment behavior is unlikely to change without the creation of incentives for payment. Through the use of both positive and negative incentives, Townships can encourage property owners to not only pay their delinquent real estate tax and municipal fee bills, but to pay their future obligations on time. This webinar will discuss billing and collection strategies that Townships can employ to enhance the collection of delinquent accounts and create incentives to increase their current collection rates going forward.

This webinar will focus on the UC quarterly report filing process for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the PSATS UC Trust. Course content is geared toward the secretary and UC Processor who is new to the filing process or for those who simply need a refresher course.This webinar was first presented in 2018. We are offering it again for those who are new to the quarterly filing process and for those who need a refresher course prior to filing the UC reports for the first quarter of 2019.

The next step for many MS4 communities is to implement Pollutant Control Measures for their discharges to surface waters impaired by acid mine drainage, pathogens, and priority organic compounds (i.e. PCBs). This first phase of these requirements is to map storm sewer sheds associated with these discharges, due with Annual MS4 Status Reports on September 30, 2019. This webinar will help prepare you for this new requirement and plan for what is to come.

Private water wells and springs are vital to Pennsylvania’s rural water infrastructure, which provides drinking water to approximately 3 million residents and farms. Because Pennsylvania lacks state regulations covering private water supplies, their proper management becomes the voluntary responsibility of homeowners who often lack a proper understanding of how they should be managed. In this webinar, Peter Wulfhorst with Penn State Extension will review results obtained from over 30 years of research and outreach, help municipal officials understand how they can help ensure the viability of private drinking water supplies, and provide available resources for municipalities and homeowners.

The Pennsylvania State Archives announced earlier this year that municipalities are now able to keep permanent records exclusively in electronic form (no paper or microfilm copy required!). But this policy change does have several requirements, most notably that permanent electronic records must be kept in PDF/A format. What does this mean for your municipality and its record keeping responsibilities? Join archivist Tyler Stump and learn about the new policy and how electronic recordkeeping requirements are changing. Stump will also be discussing electronic records best practices that can help your township effectively and efficiently store its electronic records.

This webinar will show examples of web-based maps and applications that align with local government planning needs, data resources freely available to local governments and introduce tools for mobile field data collection.

This webinar will review workers’ compensation benefits and how and how they apply to volunteer firefighters who provide fire service to your townships. Other topics to be addressed by the presenter, Andrew DiProspero of H.A. Thomson Co., include the powers of special fire police, junior firefighters, cost sharing for services, and the challenges presented by the Cancer Presumption Act.

The Trustees Insurance Fund, through PSATS, is offering a webinar to provide an introduction to our 457 Plan and help your township officials determine if this is a valuable benefit to offer to the employees. This benefit can be offered to both full-time and part-time employees for a nominal annual administrative fee.

This webinar is designed to provide participants with up-to-date information regarding how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and its nondiscrimination requirements apply to municipal websites. In this webinar, Sam Mastovich of GovUnity Websites will review the technologies that people with disabilities use to access the Internet and your municipality’s website, how poorly-designed websites can restrict the use of residents with disabilities, the ADA requirements and best practices that municipalities can implement to ensure appropriate website accessibility.

The Trustees Insurance Fund, through PSATS, is offering a webinar to provide an introduction to our 457 Plan and help your township officials determine if this is a valuable benefit to offer to the employees. This benefit can be offered to both full-time and part-time employees for a nominal annual administrative fee.