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PROPOSAL 1: The foremost area in which the grass and weed mowing program has burdened the staff of the Finance Department has been in collections. There is no documentation that we could present here to show the cost of collection efforts versus collected returns, but the effort is unquestionably not cost justified. The following policies should be adopted as standard procedure by the Finance Department in handling the weed mowing program collections: 1. in cases where billing statements are returned with unknown forwarding address, or cases where billing statements are sent to persons other than the property owners, the account should be turned back to the Public Works Department for further research; 2. in such cases the Public Works Department should return follow -up information to the Finance Department in a timely manner. For example, new invoices or requests to write off accounts should be returned within 10 days; 3. a short billing cycle should be established. After a sixty day time period from the original billing, three billing statements will have been generated. If no response has been received, the account should be written off as a bad debt and turned over to a collection agency. This will eliminate successive useless billings. Eugene Code Section 6.525 states if the bill is not paid within 40 days after the billing date, the Finance Officer may cause legal action to be brought in court for the amount of the bill; and 4. it is beyond the scope of the members of the Finance Department to determine ways that the PuUblic Works Department could reduce their operational costs. Of course, any input from that department that would achieve this result, along with suggestions of enhanced inter - departmental cooperation methods, would be appreciated. It is within our expertise, however, to advise the Public ';forks Department to strengthen their efforts to initially establish correct owner information before the original billing. This reduces the number of problem accounts and the resulting follow - up collection effort. It has been the practice during the current fiscal year for the Finance Department to "share the work" with the Public Works Department (i.e., return problem accounts to public works after an initial collections effort). This has occurred because of the chronically high incidence of problem weed mowing accounts (due to incomplete ownership and address information) and the low returns brought in by even the most diligent efforts of the Finance Depart- ment collection division. Considering the expertise of our own collection staff, and the slight return on their past efforts dealing with those problem accounts, we strongly doubt that a large collection effort conducted by the Public Works Department would be any more cost effective. We therefore encourage a determined effort on their,part to initially establish the correct and necessary billing information rather than for them to assume the tasks of what has been a less than successful collections situation. In further proposals we will suggest procedures that will help in establishing needed information. -h --