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Benchmark counties seek to lead in e-government
Sunday, October 22, 2000 By Dan Fitzpatrick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In sun-splashed San Diego County, new technology rivals the beaches, the zoo and the Sea World dolphins as regional attractions.
More than 20,000 people work in La Jolla's "Biotech Beach," a collection of biotechnology firms huddled along the coast. Telecommunications firms Qualcomm and Ericsson have turned the Sorrento Valley into the "Wireless Valley." Downtown San Diego is known as "Bandwidth Bay," a reference to the nearby Pacific Ocean and the abundance of fiber optic cables running beneath the city streets.
Now county government, once a graveyard of outdated computers and antiquated technology, wants a piece of the e-action.
In one of the largest government outsourcing deals anywhere in the country, San Diego County is paying private companies $644 million over seven years to replace and maintain every computer, telephone, switch, router, cable and network in its system. Within three years, local officials expect to have nearly every county service available on the Web, from home sales to property taxes to restaurant inspections to permits to pet adoptions.
Eventually, they expect the new computer systems and the resulting cuts in personnel to save tens of millions per year. They also expect a one-stop-shop Web portal to make life more convenient for 2.7 million county residents, allowing them to look at court records or pay their property taxes without visiting the courthouse.
"You would be able to interact with us whenever you choose to," said Tom Boardman, San Diego County's chief technology officer.
Not all PG Benchmarks regions are moving as aggressively as San Diego. But county officials around the country said computers, new technology and the Internet slowly are changing the passive relationship most citizens have with their government.
They also said e-government has the potential to make counties more efficient, accountable and open.
"We want citizens on line, not in line," said Paul Allsing, director of the e-Government Technology Center in Arizona's Maricopa County.
Starting anew
Despite grand plans, the idea of an e-government is still largely untested.
Most local governments in the United States do not have Internet connections. In a recent survey of 500 counties, the National Association of Counties found that about half did not have a Web page and even fewer have the kind of interactive services that allow citizens to pay bills online.
The Post-Gazette asked Allegheny County and the main counties in 14 other metropolitan areas to respond a series of questions about the state of their technology and the range of their Internet capabilities.
The counties representing metropolitan Atlanta, Cleveland, Kansas City and St. Louis did not respond.
Of the 11 that did, however, each has a Web site that tries to offer convenience and access to government.
Some are little more than electronic brochures, allowing users to copy a few forms but requiring that they be returned by regular mail. Others offer access to complex geographic maps, birth records, property tax information and voter registration. Some allow people to pay taxes online. Others allow people to view ballots, restaurant inspections, pictures of wanted suspects and a list of sex offenders.
A few are creating an e-marketplace where government suppliers can bid for contracts.
Some even are weighing the idea of online voting.
A big question, though, is how governments can pay for all these e-services. Most people are still wary of paying extra surcharges for the convenience of doing business online. What's more, a lot of counties find it difficult to fund Web services and, therefore, take money away from schools, prisons and health care.
"That's taxpayer money," said Allsing, of Maricopa County. "We are pretty cautious about that."
Waking a dinosaur
Few counties across the country are more "wired" than San Diego County, a government that serves a geographic area almost as large as Connecticut.
It was not always that way, though.
Four years ago, many county employees went without computers, and probation officers had to track ex-prisoners with 3-by-5 index cards. Many of the county's mainframes and personal computers were more than two decades old. When the PCs broke down, as they did frequently, repairs would take weeks, and county employees took to pen and paper instead.
The county's computer system was a "dinosaur," the county said in a letter to employees. Web browsers rarely worked. Departments had problems sending e-mail messages to each other.
"There were a lot of problems," said John Eger, a professor of communications and public policy at San Diego State University.
Money was one of the biggest problems.
In 1996, the county nearly declared bankruptcy. Only a $180 million sale of its landfills and trash collection kept the county solvent. By mid-1997, county officials realized they needed to do something about their outdated technology. But they estimated it would cost $250 million to replace the equipment.
"We all recognized there was no hope of that happening," Boardman said.
So the county decided to get out of the technology business. It outsourced its computer maintenance and operations to a group that includes Computer Sciences Corp., Pacific Bell and Lucent Technologies. The $644 million deal, county officials said, is the largest outsourcing of technology by a local government anywhere in the country.
Upfront, the private group is spending $100 million on new equipment, which includes 18,000 telephones and 14,000 PCs. It is putting new fiber optic cable in the ground. It is consolidating a half-dozen e-mail systems, so that different departments can send messages back and forth. It also has hired 220 employees who used to work for the county's computer center, saving the county hundreds of thousands in payroll costs.
At first blush, the deal is more expensive for the county.
Normal maintenance of San Diego's computer systems would cost $72 million per year. With this new deal, though, the county pays $92 million per year.
But the true savings will appear later, Boardman said. Having private companies run its computer systems will allow San Diego County to move hundreds of county employees from back-office jobs to front-line duties. Some will move to programs that are reimbursed by the state and federal government.
The savings in payroll costs could amount to tens of millions per year.
"That is where the real money is," Boardman said.
Going on the Web
Counties across the country are using technology to make government run better and more efficiently.
Some police departments are arming their squad cars with wireless laptop computers that can tap into a database from anywhere. Some emergency workers are using computer-aided dispatch. Some health clinics are using video conferences to serve clients in remote locations. Public defenders and district attorneys are using the same technology to conduct arraignments and depositions without moving inmates from building to building.
But the true focus of most e-government efforts is the Internet. The goal is to put all county services online. Today, though, most of the information flows one way -- out.
Take San Diego County.
Residents there can look for home sales, look at photos of pets in local animal shelters, check their property taxes and see a list of people in jail. When a company wants to relocate to the county, it can look at a database of available properties.
With a few variations, the same is true in many of the other PG Benchmarks regions.
In Greater Miami's Dade County, citizens can download marriage license forms, get a voter registration application, look at meeting agendas, pay traffic tickets and arrange a trial date to challenge tickets.
In Greater Cleveland's Cuyahoga County, residents can find the area's lowest and highest gas prices, down to the location and price. Also, they can look at pictures of the 10 "most wanted" suspects in that county.
In Seattle's King County, residents can search for sex offenders by ZIP code. They can also order birth and death certificates, view images of recorded documents and get e-mail alerts about traffic and bus routes. In Tampa's Hillsborough County, people can adopt a dog or a pond. In Colorado's Denver County, you can pay water bills, pay parking fines, register your bicycle, register to vote and get forms to start a new business.
The goal is to create a "government without walls, doors or clocks," said Eric Stuckey, assistant county administrator for Hamilton County in Greater Cincinnati.
Officials there want people to be able to apply for building permits online and pay parking tickets.
But those things have not happened yet.
"Quite frankly, the law has not caught up with the technology," Stuckey said.
One of the most comprehensive Web sites among the PG Benchmarks regions belongs to metropolitan Phoenix's Maricopa County, which also happens to be among the country's fastest-growing areas. The county established its Web site in 1995.
At the time, the site was "of nominal use to the citizen," Allsing said. "No one knew where the Web would go at that time."
Now, the county is on its third Web redesign. Residents can adopt a pet online and view a list of property sales in their neighborhood, a service that people normally have to get from a Realtor or title company.
Using Maricopa's site, they can get it free.
"We don't believe in charging individual citizens for data they own," Allsing said.
One of the most popular uses of Maricopa's site is a feature that allows residents to look at the five most recent health inspections for a local restaurant. The level of detail is, at times, unappetizing. One local inspection for an upscale steak house noted that "toxic items were stored in a manner which may cause contamination of food."
Allsing said the restaurant feature is popular because it "gives citizens access to something they are interested in." The other benefit is to "show citizens the depth and scope in which the county is looking after their interests."
The site's weakness, Allsing said, is that it does not allow citizens to make payments online using credit cards. The county's attorney is concerned about losing revenue to a credit card company. Such an arrangement may constitute a discount in property taxes, which Maricopa County cannot allow by law.
E-commerce is still "a tough nut to crack," Allsing said.
In Hennepin County in Greater Minneapolis, the most popular Web feature is property tax information. Another is a list of local children up for adoption.
Accompanying the list is a story about each child.
Since the county added adoption candidates to its site, the number of children going to new families has increased. Last year, the county placed 340 kids in new homes, up from 283 in 1998 and 167 in 1997.
"That was a great unintended consequence that came as a result of getting stories of kids on the Web," said Bob Hanson, chief information officer for Hennepin County.
E-barriers
The two things that keep counties from achieving true e-government are money and staffing.
"That's what it is, money," said Jackie Buyers, research director for the National Association of Counties.
Maricopa County, for example, spends $1 million on its Web services. Milwaukee County, by comparison, has only $200,000. Its Information Management Services director, Genevie Kocourek, has asked for $800,000 to improve the county's Web site, which offers fewer services than any other PG Benchmarks region surveyed by the Post-Gazette. "It's very limited," she said.
If county officials approve her request, "we expect it to change quickly. We have been champing at the bit to get this baby out."
But even Maricopa County's site has its limitations.
Unlike most counties, it does not sell geographic mapping information online. And the park and recreation department recently asked to reserve camp sites online, only to have the idea rejected.
"It was going to cost far more to implement it than we are spending on it now," Allsing said.
Another barrier to e-government is bureaucracy. Governments hoping to sell services online have to overcome several regulations and laws that do not always apply to private companies.
But as more Americans get used to conducting online transactions, they may expect the same type of service from a government Web site as they do from Amazon.com. So the pressure is on the counties to make things easier.
"We need to make it more and more user friendly," said Stuckey, of Hamilton County. "We have more to do, but I think we've made good progress."
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