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CREATIVE CITY NEWSLETTER: JULY 2003

ISSUE 8: NEW OPPORTUNITIES

ISSUE IN FOCUS: E-government On-Line, Easy, and Accessible
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Community Development Lends its Hand to Economic Development
CREATIVE CORNER: Smart Land Use
The Young Creatives Speak
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ISSUE IN FOCUS: E-GOVERNMENT ON-LINE, EASY, AND ACCESSIBLE

CREATIVE CITY ROANOKE TOPS THE LIST!!
FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 28, 2003:

Special Report E-Commerce
By ELIZABETH WEINSTEIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When it came time to build a city Web site for Madison, Wis., planners faced an oversized bureaucratic headache. More than 30 government agencies would be represented on the site, and all of them had different ideas about what they wanted -- and when they'd offer it.

Getting the e-government initiative up and running turned into a case study in the hardships and unforeseen trade-offs that a city faces in getting government online. With no pot of money set aside in the budget for Web initiatives and no power to enforce across-the-board standards on how agencies' Web pages should look and function, the site's key personnel have often resorted to compromises, guesswork and penny-pinching to get their job done.

But the results have been worth it. The city has created a bustling heartland hub that's bringing unexpected revenue to the city's coffers, along with some national recognition. Madison's 213,679 residents can visit www.ci.madison.wi.us1 and link to every agency from the assessor's to the treasurer's office, download scores of forms and make online payments to the city -- all from the comfort of their home computer.
"I've paid my property taxes, water bills and, if I get them, parking tickets online," says 29-year-old Madison resident Jason Kruse. "I do a lot of bills online, and Madison's site is one of the easier ones to navigate."

For former Mayor Susan J.M. Bauman, who left office April 15, Madison's Web wake-up call came about four years ago in the mail. "I got a notice to renew my car registration, and there was a note saying I could do it online," she explains. "I wondered how the state got ahead of the city, and I challenged our information-services people to do something about it."

"I've paid my property taxes, water bills and, if I get them, parking tickets online," says 29-year-old Madison resident Jason Kruse. "I do a lot of bills online, and Madison's site is one of the easier ones to navigate."

Wheeling and Dealing

Mayor Bauman quickly made expanding e-government services one of her five initiatives for improving the city, with heavy emphasis on getting online transactions up and running.

Prodding staid city agencies to join forces on the Web was hard at first, says Mike Simle, the city's Web administrator. Although all departments wanted to have information on Madison's site, they were slow providing the content.

AT CITIZENS' SERVICE

The top-ranked cities in each category of the Center for Digital Government's Digital Cities Survey of e-government sites. In some cases, top cities shared ranks because their overall scores were identical. The cities are grouped by population.

More than 250,000
125,000-250,000
75,000 - 125,000

1 Honolulu
1 Des Moines, Iowa
1 Roanoke, Va.

1 Tampa, Fla.
2 Plano, Texas
2 Fort Collins, Colo.

3 Kansas City, Mo.
3 Fort Wayne, Ind.
3 Independence, Mo.

4 New York
3 Richmond, Va.
4 Bellevue, Wash.

4 Seattle
3 Torrance, Calif.
5 Boulder, Colo.

Source: 2002 survey of 125 cities by the Center for Digital Government

Mr. Simle says he showed agencies the benefits of going on-line, such as reduced paperwork-and also did some subtle arm-twisting.

"I first tried to persuade them by saying, 'Hey, this agency has something up, and you need to get something up too,'" he says. "But we'd also get requests from citizens, and we'd take the requests directly to the agencies and say, 'Citizens are asking for it.'"

The technical side of things took just as much negotiating. Much of the site's work has been done by "winging it," says Donald Ramig, who oversaw Madison's information-services department until he retired in January. There's no money set aside in the city's budget for Web initiatives, for one thing. Any improvements to the city site must be kept within the city's yearly hardware and software budget of around $1.47 million, which is mainly reserved for upgrades to computer equipment throughout city agencies. The city avoids outsourcing when it can and keeps expenses as low as possible.

"We choose to do things as economically as we can," Mr. Simle explains. "We know keeping things in-house is the right thing to do."

For example, Madison recently used old-fashioned bartering to convince city employee Sarah Edgerton to head up the site's redesign. In exchange for three new computers for her office at Madison's City Channel 12 TV station -- fancier models than she would've gotten under the city's scheduled upgrade -- Ms. Edgerton, a programming supervisor, and a partner agreed to do the design work free after a little cramming at nearby Madison Area Technical College. Working at nights and on weekends, the novice Web designers worked their way through classes such as Introduction to the Internet, Web Page Design I and Beginning HTML.

With some technical help from Mr. Simle, the partners took the site's raw resources and revamped the portal. Since its debut late last year, the site has boosted its monthly visitor numbers by 23% over the 207,736 visitors it had during the month the redesigned portal made its debut. Compare that to the possible cost of outsourcing the work: One city agency, which did not wish to be identified, got a low bid of $50,000 to $70,000 to outsource its site's redesign.

Moreover, Ms. Edgerton now helps with other Web-design work throughout the city, saving the government even more money. "I get to acquire new skills and enjoy my job, and those are major benefits to me," Ms. Edgerton says.

Ticket to Click

The most popular feature of the site has been parking-ticket payments. Since the service went online in April 2001, Madison has sent out notices to people with tickets outstanding, explaining how they can pay their fines online -- and citizens have responded in droves, thanks largely to the convenience, police speculate. The city has collected nearly $1 million in payments from every state and as far away as Japan. During a record day, one Madison resident paid 28 parking tickets totaling $1,024 in a single sitting. Craig Franklin, an accountant in Madison's comptroller's office, says it's "very apparent" that revenue has increased from online ticket transactions, though he can't quantify how much.

Since parking tickets went online, the city has collected payments dating back as far as 1997. Mr. Franklin says under normal circumstances, tickets that old would have gone unpaid.

Since then, a number of other fees have been made payable online. When property- tax payments went online last November, more than 1,500 payments came in, totaling $5.3 million. (That's about 4.5% of total property-tax payments the city collected last year.) And local straphangers have slowly started buying bundles of tickets from their computers rather than at the bus depot. So far, the city has collected more than $5,000 in transportation-ticket payments.

BY THE PEOPLE

A recent survey of 422 online adults by the University of Maryland and Rockbridge Associates found that more people interacted with state and local governments in 2002 than in the previous year. Some sample findings:

BY THE PEOPLE

Task
2001
2002

Visited a local or state government Web site
50%
39%

Conducted business with local or state government online
16%
19%

Visited a federal government Web site
33%
36%

Conducted business with federal government online
11%
18%

Note: 418 online adults were surveyed in 2001

Source: 2002 National Technology Readiness Survey by the Center for e-Service at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and Rockbridge Associates

All payments are processed at Madisonpay.com (www.madisonpay.com2), a Web site run by outside vendor Vanco Services LLC. Users can pay by credit card or electronic withdrawal from checking or savings accounts, and to make online transactions more attractive to citizens, the city absorbs Vanco's fees that would otherwise be passed on to customers, including a 25-cent fee for transactions and a one-time 50-cent fee for setting up an account at the site. Madison also covers an additional 2.19% credit-card fee passed on from credit card issuers. The city initially considered handling the transactions internally, among other options, but didn't think it could get the service up and running quickly enough.

For all the successes of Madison's e-government efforts, its architects feel the Web site has one big limitation: lack of oversight. For example, when the novice designers put together the redesign of the city's site, they chose to follow a complex set of standards required by Section 508, the law that requires federal government Web pages -- but not municipal ones -- to be easily accessible for people with visual impairment and other disabilities. In some cases, the designers weren't sure whether some aspects of design -- like drop-down menus -- were permissible or if they would conflict with Web browsers designed for the handicapped. And there was no central authority, such as a chief information officer, to turn to for answers.

"We didn't want to do drop-down menus in the past because we thought it wasn't acceptable with Section 508 codes, but now we're not so sure," Mr. Simle says.

The lack of a leader with a clear mandate to oversee the city's Web policies or guide them on technical issues can be frustrating, Mr. Simle says. Even though the Web sites for all of Madison's agencies can be reached from the city's main Web page, Mr. Simle and his team don't design all of the individual agencies' pages -- half of the agencies run their own. And that often results in dated content that doesn't jell well with the city site's new look.

Some agencies bristle at using the standard Madison header and logo, while others have designs "I'm not crazy about," Mr. Simle says, although he won't go into specifics. Keeping Madison's Web needs on the radar screen with city decision makers will take time and persistence, Mr. Simle says, but they're something he intends to discuss with Dave Cieslewicz, Madison's new mayor.

"We've thought about an oversight committee with someone from the mayor's staff on board to give it some heft," he says. "That's something I want to bring up."

A CIO with powers to enforce Web standards can be an important factor that distinguishes top sites, according to results from a national survey by the Center for Digital Government. The Folsom, Calif., research institute included Madison for the first time in its 2002 "Digital Cities" survey of 125 cities. The annual survey gauges how city governments adopt and use digital technology to deliver services to their citizens. For cities with populations of 125,000 to 250,000, Madison ranked 14th out of a pool of 18 cities. Des Moines, Iowa, headed the list, with Plano, Texas, Fort Wayne, Ind., Richmond, Va., and Torrance, Calif., rounding out the top five cities, respectively.

Though Madison scored high for broadcasting its city meetings over the Web, for its online transactions and for other features, the city's ranking suffered because it didn't have a CIO with policy authority. CIOs can be key in giving sites what's known as a "common look and feel," notes Cathilea Robinett, executive director of the institute.

Under the E-Government Act that passed late last year, federal sites must standardize their Web pages by making content easier to search, categorizing information more carefully and maintaining cohesive designs.

Though city-government sites aren't mandated to implement common-look-and-feel standards, Ms. Robinett says simply keeping citizens under a common Web address and navigation bar as they move through their city's departments is a start. But getting territorial city agencies to work together can be a challenge, she admits.

"If a city has a central information officer, then things can really happen. But if you have city agencies that work autonomously, then you'll have a hard time getting a common look and feel," Ms. Robinett says. "The more agencies work together as a city, the better."

-- Ms. Weinstein is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau.