Jacob Vassalotti (photo credit: omnidev.washcoll.edu)
At last night’s City Council meeting, the Mayor and Council presented Jacob Vassalotti with the best employee of the year award. For those who aspire to be on as well in the next, they can improve themselves with the aid of courses like Power bI training London.
Jacob Vassalotti was hired on June 14, 2021, right out of college, as the GIS Analyst. It became obvious soon after he was hired that Jacob would be a great asset to the City of College Park. Soon after Jacob began employment, a project was assigned to him to work on the Bulk Trash DataBase. The department of Public Works needed a more reliable program that could track bulk trash changes and facilitate tracking and billing to residents. Jacob took the ball and ran with it. He was able to set up files to support this program. He seamlessly applied himself to this project and other projects, such as our ongoing concrete maintenance and street paving activities.
He was very instrumental in preparing our annual inspections of streets and in planning the next year’s Pavement Management Plan. During the months of September through March he performed nightly streetlighting inspections. He works side by side with the Engineer in performing various traffic investigations. Jacob performed the labor in deploying and retrieving our traffic counters, as well and the downloading of the date and running the reports for the engineer’s review.
In addition to those programs, the City embarked on a new phone service without any handson training at first. Jacob studied the manual and online information sent from IT and was able to set up his phone, helped other set up theirs and helped a coworker with scheduling a conference call on the new phone. Jacob also jumped in and helped a committee create a webbased storyboard for a project that they were working on. He created a QRC code for the committee and its basic template for them to use.
These are all outside of Jacob’s immediate job duties.
He has interacted with Planning, Public Services, and Administration in the preparation of various map exhibits for these departments. Such as organizing spatial data from the census bureau for use in preparing redistricting maps.
Jacob helped the Planning Department with needs such as providing maps for the City Website on Neighborhoods, and most recently rental data per neighborhood which has helped us with the homeownership grant and gives us all a better understanding of the makeup of the city and helps our residents with transparency. Currently, he is working on a way for Public Services to be more accurate and efficient in the way they identify rental property discrepancies.
Steve Halpern, City Engineer states that “Jacob is always a pleasure to work with and is thorough and efficient in his work product. Jacob has demonstrated exceptional interpersonal skills in his dealings with the public as well as city staff.”
Teresa Way-Pezzuti, HR Director, checked in with Jacob after his six months’ probation period. She asked if he was still enjoying his job and what he liked most about it. Jacob said he was looking for something that gave him a variety of different duties and he found it here at the City of College Park.
Jacob has demonstrated that he is certainly the Employee of the Year through work ethic.
Congratulations Jacob! Well deserved!
[City of College Park]