An e-mail exchange in April obtained through a public records
request revealed that a government agency employee purchased an
Apple iPad with a Santa Clara Valley Water District company credit
card for at-large board director Cy Mann.
An e-mail exchange in April obtained through a public records request revealed that a government agency employee purchased an Apple iPad with a Santa Clara Valley Water District company credit card for at-large board director Cy Mann.
District Clerk of the Board Michele King updated Mann on the status of the order on April 26 as Melissa Diltz, a district employee, placed the water district’s name on a wait list to purchase a 64-gigabyte iPad three weeks after the product was released. A 64-GB iPad retails for $699 or $829, not including tax, depending on specifications. It was unclear which iPad Mann purchased.
“I have 40-something meetings a month,” Mann said. “I gotta carry around all these binders … what I do is I have all that stuff on PDFs and put it on the iPad – it’s a lot more efficient (for) district business and informational stuff. I save the forest.”
Each of the seven directors at the water district are allocated $2,500 a year in discretionary funds for an annual total of $17,500. The money is used for business-related expenditures outside the $260 each director is paid for each meeting they attend – up to 10 meetings a month – as well as travel and mileage.
Mann said the $208.33 he is given each month is “nothing” and he suggested the amount should be revisited. New technology is one way to the spend the money or for tickets to a charity dinner, for example, where it might be important for a director to show their support, he said.
An Apple employee at Oakridge Mall in San Jose recommended the 16-GB version of the iPad if its use is only to view PDFs and not movies or to play games. The 16-GB version retails for $499. He said the average PDF is a few hundred kilobytes with the largest PDF reaching one or two megabytes. At that rate, a 16-GB iPad can store about 16,000 PDFs.
“Sixty-four is totally unnecessary,” he said.
Mann said the reason for requesting the most advanced model was for “large files storage limitations.”
As of Thursday, many laptops from established companies with 250-plus GB of storage were available for between $300 and $400.
When asked about the iPad purchased on the company’s dime, CEO Beau Goldie said the district does have one iPad that he believed a director had requested.
The information technology department sometimes purchases new technology to see if it improves operations or a single version of an updated software might be bought to test before purchasing more, he said.
