Oak Harbor’s “paperless councilman” has helped change the way information is shared and meetings are conducted in City Hall.

Since entering office, Councilman Joel Servatius has pushed the city to embrace technology and has helped bring about an important milestone this week.

The entire council went paperless — for the most part — and used their new iPads at the regular meeting Tuesday night.

“I’m very excited,” he said. “Anytime you can use technology to save money and increase efficiency, it’s a win for everyone.”

Servatius recently gave his colleagues a workshop on how to use the city’s new iPads. He showed, for example, the ease in which it can be used to search through documents, which is extremely useful when council handles issues with long or complicated history.

“You just enter a search term and it can rip through that almost instantly,” he said, “and find every instance of that term.”

In addition, he showed the council how they can highlight or add notes to pages.

Servatius explained that he was met with a hill of paperwork when taking office in 2012. At that time, staff members printed 14 copies of the voluminous agenda packets for each meeting, which he said added up to about 42,000 pages a year.

And that didn’t include all the paper that’s created for workshops.

Paper is costly, he said. It costs about one cent for each black-and-white copy and 7.8 cents per color page.

Servatius said the iPads will pay for themselves in paper savings in about 18 months.

Anna Thompson, the city clerk, said creating the digital documents for the council is a relatively straight-forward process. She pointed out that the city has agenda packets and a lot of other material available online for the public from all the way back to 2009.

Essentially, anyone with a computer or iPad will have the same access to most, if not all, of the same materials that the council does.

Servatius said he bought his own iPad for council work in order to show that it can be done. The council members have had laptops for years, but they are aging and have limited capabilities.

Apparently everyone was impressed. When the opportunity came for the city to purchase iPads at a special price, the council jumped at the chance.

The council members at the workshop seemed to embrace the iPads, though Councilman Rick Almberg needed a little extra attention.

Councilman Jim Campbell may be the oldest member of the council, but he’s a big fan of technology. He said he wished the city at large could go paperless and place everything online for the public to see, but the upfront cost is currently prohibitive.

As for the iPads, Campbell said they’re great.

“Just like anything else, you need to play with it to get the hang of it,” he said.

Servatius said he been at meetings with council members from cities across the state and found that about three-quarters of them are already using iPads or similar devices for city business.

“We’re actually behind the times,” he said.

Servatius said Mayor Scott Dudley encouraged him to join the city’s technology committee, which he did in order to help usher in a new age of technology.

He said he hopes to help bring technology to work in other areas of the city, whether it’s the RV park reservation system or smart lighting.