The Kittitas County Treasurer’s Office has received a national award for excellence in business process transformation.
The Public Sector Champion award was presented by Thomson Reuters.
The award represents 2 1/2 years of hard work by county Treasurer’s Office staff, and the feedback of many local agencies, Kittitas County Treasurer Brett Wachsmith said.
“It’s a pretty big honor,” Wachsmith said. “It’s been a long, 2 1/2 year process.”
The awards spotlight government officials and programs driving accessible technologies and promoting accountability with a significant public impact.
Winners are judged by a panel of seven people. Award winners are from across the U.S.
The awards were presented at the Thomson Reuters annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas, on Sept. 20.
Since 2015, Wachsmith said his office’s single most important goal was to put as much of its paperwork online as possible.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What do we want this office to look like? Not by the next election cycle, but in the next 10 years,” Wachsmith said. “We wanted to do as much as we can online.”
Wachsmith led talks involving the Treasurer’s Office and local taxing districts across the county — such as the Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue, the Kittitas School District, and the county’s water districts — to improve services.
There are eight people who work in the Treasurer’s Office, including Wachsmith. The office is responsible for investing county money, and the office has grown the county’s investment portfolio from $70 million in 2015 to $100 million with more than $1 million in interest earnings, Wachsmith said on a video during the awards presentation.
Wachsmith said another goal was to simplify the steps staff members take to perform their daily workload.
“There can be as many as 2,500 to 3,000 affidavits submitted a year,” Wachsmith said in an interview. “A title company would present one to us and we would have to enter it manually. A task that used to take as much as 30 to 40 to 50 minutes now just takes about five minutes.”
