Horsham Council Goes Paperless

Good-bye hefty packets, hello sleek new computers. 

, in an attempt to save money on the cost of printing thick stacks of paperwork for each of its five council members, has purchased five iPads, a move that officials said will save roughly $1,000 a year. 

Township Manager Bill Walker said the tablet computers cost $3,700. The expense of copying booklets and meeting packets runs about $4,700 a year, he said.

“This is the first meeting that you’re paperless,” Walker said to the governing body during this week’s meeting.

David Stinson, a product implementation specialist at Freedom Systems, the township’s IT firm, said free applications can help distribute and archive what would otherwise amount to lots of wasted paper or a clogged email inbox.

“We need to save our resources and save the planet,” Stinson said during a brief presentation. “The biggest culprit of wasting paper is government.”

Note taking can be done on the device as well, Stinson said.

Besides cutting down on paper, Horsham Township Councilman Gregory Nesbitt said the new technology enables officials to use Google maps to quickly and easily see an aerial view of an address for land development applications.

Moving forward, Walker said the township could request PDFs of land development plans, so they could be easily transmitted to the council, which he said would also cut down on the number of copies required to be submitted.