Letter of Engagement
September 1, 2026
Hypertheory Contract Services
Re: Work order intake consolidation — Streets & Public Works
To the engagement team:
Thank you for taking this on. I will keep this brief because Ted Vosmik, who runs Streets, will be out on a truck for most of your first week and I would rather you hear the problem from me than wait.
Work orders reach Streets four different ways. There is the form on the village website, the telephone at Village Hall, a shared mailbox that three people watch unevenly, and Ted writing them on a clipboard in the field. Nothing reconciles them against one another. The practical result is that the same pothole is opened three times, and at least once this summer a work order was closed by someone who had already fixed it the previous Tuesday and did not know there were two others.
We have contracted for three things:
- Consolidate intake into one stream, so that a request is one request regardless of which of the four ways it arrived.
- Route work to the department that owns it, without a person deciding that by hand each morning.
- Verify vendor standing before any work is dispatched outside the village.
On the third item, please speak with Dale Kuchenbrod, Clerk of Council, at extension 104, and please treat what he tells you as settled rather than as a starting position. Purchasing rules here are statutory. Certain vendors are debarred and may not be used at all; others are suspended, which is a different thing with different consequences. Dale did not write these rules and cannot waive them, and neither can I.
The approved vendor list is no longer a spreadsheet. Last quarter’s engagement with the Clerk’s office moved it into a purchasing system that answers over the network, and its documentation is in the API catalog on this portal. It is a different department and a different system, and you should expect to work with it the way you would work with anyone else’s.
Council adopted Resolution 2026-14 on August 18. It takes effect October 1. I have been asked to report on our readiness at the first meeting in October, and I would like to have something to say.
I do not have a list of screens for you. I have a question I will be asked in October, and I do not yet know exactly how it will be worded.
Sincerely,
Marguerite Ferraro
Village Administrator