Board of Larimer County Commissioners Celebrates Employee Innovation

The Board of Larimer County Commissioners honored employees who have shown ingenuity, creativity, and improved processes Wednesday, October 7 at Larimer County with the 2020 Innovation Awards.

One Grand Prize Winner and two Runner-Up Winners were given awards in the ninth year of the Innovation Awards program. These awards were decided upon based on resourceful, groundbreaking, or novel approaches to providing Larimer County services to residents with a budget of $5,000 for the awards given to one project or split among multiple projects.

The grand prize was $3,000 and went to Joe Schreurs, Susan Hays, Katie Evans, Linette Schweizer, Hilery Mesloh, Angela Priest, Ingrid Schroeder, Leslie Waterhouse-Reavis, Brant Gluth, Rupali Gagvani, and Derik Stalls for creating and producing a mobile phone app that allowed pre-trial program functions to be handled remotely and recorded directly to a database. Pre-Trial Services is a unit within the Criminal Justice Department, and the new app allows staff to manage large caseloads better.

The Pretrial Mobile App was used for a total of 47,025 check-ins and 7,238 court event follow-ups in 2019. This resulted in a 64% reduction in time it took staff interacting with pre-trials.

One of the runner-up winners was Nicole Aguilar, Tracy Hines, and Shawn May for Food Truck Roundup, who received $1,000. Larimer County Health and Environment partnered with Larimer County Finance to help food truck owners understand and comply with sales tax requirements to operate their businesses.

This team’s partnership increases tax revenues to support voter-approved projects, and Larimer County is currently collecting sales tax that could have been lost. The State of Colorado, cities, and towns in Larimer County also benefit from additional sales tax revenues from properly licensed food trucks without needing any additional enforcement.

Amanda Repella and Liz Young Winne were also runner-up winners who were awarded $1,000 for a multi-modal Index, which is a data-driven transportation access tool used for decision-making. This collaborative team came from the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment’s Built Environment program to create a new mapping tool that communicates neighborhood access to transportation options within Fort Collins or Loveland.

The tool also helps to identify challenges and opportunities associated with safely and efficiently walking, bike, or riding the bus within these communities.

For more information regarding The Board of Larimer County Commissioners, visit: https://www.larimer.org/bocc