Va.'s digital legislature ranked 8th in the nation

Virginia's legislature ranks eighth in the nation in its use of technology to keep citizens informed of legislative activity.

Nevada has the most digitally advanced legislature, according to the 2003 Digital Legislatures Survey.

In addition to good online information, it provides live broadcasts of interim committee meetings.

Minnesota and South Dakota tied for second.

The survey was conducted by the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on information technology in government and education.

Rankings were based on online access to legislation and elected officials, and to technology support for operational efficiencies.

The Digital Legislatures Survey is the first study of its kind that will be used as a model for electronic government.

In August, all 50 state legislative offices were invited to participate in the survey. Officials responded to a set of 12 questions and ranked their offices according to a four-point scale, providing URLs and background data for final verification and validation.

Rounding out the top-10 state legislatures behind Nevada, Minnesota and South Dakota are:

Third Place: Louisiana
Fourth Place: Iowa
Fifth Place: Illinois
Sixth Place: Indiana
Seventh Place: Utah
Eighth Place: Virginia and Washington (tied)

Virginia's Legislative Information System tracks every bill introduced in the General Assembly since 1994. More than 27,000 bills can be found on the site, along with information about Virginia's 140 legislators, the assembly's 25 standing committees and the various support agencies.

"We're largely taxpayer-funded so it's straight out of the taxpayer's pocket. We owe it to them to do the best we can," said William E. Wilson, director of automated systems. "The system a (legislator) uses to find a copy of a bill is the same system you use."

From Nov. 1 to Nov. 30, the site registered 1,877,850 hits with 50,355 different viewers.

Wilson attributes much of the site's success to its no-nonsense design. The site has changed little since it was started in the 1990s.

"We've steered away from slick and stayed with reliable," Wilson said.

24/7 for home-buyers

Type a Virginia Beach address  any address  into the city's new home-buying Web page and within seconds a slew of information about the property pops onto the screen. Flood plains, jet noise, property assessments (no property owners' names)  all at your fingertips.

The site allows potential home buyers to act quickly on real-estate opportunities and prevent last-minute panic over flood insurance, said David C. Sullivan, the city's chief information officer.

Before, people had to go to city hall to find information on flood plains.

"You may look at a property on a Saturday, when it's listed, but if you wait until Monday to go to city hall to check the records, it may be too late,'' Sullivan said.

The URL is:vbgov.com/homebuying

The city's Department of Housing and Neighborhood Preservation also has been developing a Web page for homeowners.

That Web site will include census information for each census block, plus crime statistics and housing conditions, according to Andrew M. Friedman, department director.

A new acronym: VAMANet

Commissioners of Revenue in nearly 40 Virginia localities are providing remote access to public real-estate data, using a commercial service known as the Virginia Mass Appraisal Network.

A handful offer free online service to the general public; most offer a subscription service aimed primarily at realtors, banks, appraisers and government agencies. Subscriptions can run as high as $1,500 a year for multiple jurisdictions.

Augusta County Commissioner Jean Shrewsburg has nothing but praise for VAMANet, saying there's been "a sharp decline in the amount of staff time that has to be devoted to helping people access public records at the revenue office."

Public officials of the year

Two Fairfax County IT officials were named to Governing magazine's list of 10 top public officials of the year.

The winners were Chief Information Officer David Molchany and Information Technology Department Director Wanda Gibson.

Fairfax, which has a high percentage of households connected to the Internet, still has plenty of residents who don't have a computer at home. For that reason, in addition to being offered online and through wireless devices, services are also available at kiosks in libraries, malls and elsewhere, and by telephone via interactive voice response, so citizens can do business with the county round the clock.

The Fairfax Web site gets 625,000 visits a month, while the interactive voice response system gets more than 800,000 calls annually. Fairfax also was one of the first to redesign its Web site so that it was organized not by internal government structure but rather by constituent interest. The project involved redesigning 15,000 pages within six months.

More recently, the county began video-streaming supervisors' meetings on the Internet. Archived meetings also will be available.

Norfolk City Manager Regina Williams also made the top-10 list. She was cited for a successful neighborhood focus, new partnerships with various Norfolk constituencies and an ability to get things done outside the limelight.

Roanoke again cited for its e-gov service

Roanoke is the most digital-savvy, cutting-edge small city in the nation, according to the 2003 Digital Cities Survey.

The survey is conducted annually by the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on information technology in government and education.

The survey examined and assessed how city governments are progressing in utilizing information technology to streamline operations and deliver quality service to their citizens.

Mayors, city managers and chief information officers in more than 300 cities across the nation were invited to participate. In the larger-city categories, Tampa and Fort Wayne were also rated tops.

Roanoke is the only municipality to rank first in the survey three years straight.

Mayor Ralph Smith said the award reflects the city council's commitment to use information technology to improve service delivery to the residents of Roanoke and to create a high-tech environment for local business establishments.

"Roanoke's e-government initiatives provide citizens and businesses with a robust selection of online services, ranging from bill payment to a geographic information system," said Smith. "In addition to the public Web site, Roanoke is very excited about many of the new innovative e-government initiatives made possible by partnering with other public and private agencies around the valley, including free downtown wireless Internet access for public use, regional public access kiosks to promote the Roanoke Valley, and city council Web-casting."

Prince William honored for digital government

Prince William County's Web site is the best of its breed, among U.S. counties in the 250,000-500,000 population category, according to a national contest performed by the Center for Digital Government, the National Association of Counties and Government and Technology Magazine.

The Web site is: pwcgov.org

County supervisor agendas are made available through instant e-mail or text messages. Title companies are charged a fee for remote access to land records. More than 7,000 online building permits were issued in the first half of the year. Citizens can pay taxes electronically, using a credit card or check.

Real estate assessments are provided, with an opt-out feature for property owners who want names withheld from the online database.

The site gets about 1 million visits every 90 days, according to the Manassas Journal Messenger.

VDOT, 15 others cited for e-gov work

Winners of the Governor's 2003 Technology Awards:

" Virginia Department of Transportation
" Virginia State Police
" Novell Inc. of Herndon
" Comprehensive Computer Solutions Inc. (CCS-Inc.) of Christiansburg
" Tele-Works Inc., of Blacksburg
" Virginia Department of Transportation and TrafficLand Inc. of Herndon
" Henrico County Public Schools
" Fairfax County Public Schools
" Virtual Library of Virginia
" Commonwealth's Attorneys' Services Council
" Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
" Department of Social Services
" City of Hampton
" Wise County Circuit Court Clerk's Office
" The Virginia Alliance for Secure Computing and Networking (VA SCAN), including James Madison University, George Mason University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech

For details, please visit the Coalition's Web site:
opengovva.org/covits03.html

A $49.95 bargain' from VDOT

If you're a traveler on I-81, the Virginia Department of Transportation is offering 511 Virginia E-Mail Alert service to keep you posted about bad weather and bad wrecks. But there's a hitch: the e-mail news updates will cost you $49.95 a year, according to a VDOT news release.

That didn't sit well with Chris Graham, co-publisher of the Augusta Free Press.

Using words such as "boondoggle" and "utterly ridiculous," Graham wrote in an online editorial:
"We are already paying for the service . . . provided by your transportation department - which we probably don't have to remind you gets its operating money from you and your tax dollars. That's $49.95 a year for information that will be similar to information that will be posted for free to the VDOT Web site at:
http://www.-511virginia.org.

"See, state government - and any level of government, when you break it down - works by taxpayers paying into the system to provide for certain revenues that are needed in turn to provide for certain public services.

"Such as, to name one example, the operation of a VDOT Web page.

"We pay for people to maintain the page, input information into the system that ends up being displayed on the page, those kinds of things.

"Now, and here's the issue we have with this . . . these e-mail updates that we're going to be paying for, they're bits of information that will be compiled from similar bits of information submitted for posting on the VDOT Web page.

"It doesn't take much sense to figure out that a desktop system could be devised within a few minutes that would allow the person in charge of uploading the news-alert information to the Web page to, at the same time, create the e-mail news alert with a click or two of the mouse.

"It is this click or two that we will be charged for, folks."

New laws target junk mail on Web
Congress has approved the first national bill outlawing junk e-mails for cheap loans, prescription drug, get-rich-quick schemes and "enhanced" body parts.

Under the new anti-spam law, signed by President Bush Dec. 16, consumers can opt out of receiving e-commerce messages.

Critics say it lacks the punch of stronger state legislation that it's replacing, but Attorney General Jerry Kilgore said Virginia was unaffected. Virginia announced its first felony spam indictments in early December, charging two North Carolina men with running a major illegal bulk e-mail operation.

Under the bill, e-mailers of billions of pornography and e-commerce scams face up to a year in jail and multimillion-dollar fines.

The legislation also requires unsolicited e-mails to include a mechanism so recipients can indicate they do not want future mass mailings.

The bill bans spammers from hiding behind false return addresses and prohibits senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites. Commercial e-mail must carry a valid subject line indicating it is an advertisement and the legitimate physical address of the mailer.

Critics say the law makes too many concessions to "legitimate" marketers like those represented by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), opening the door for a tide of e-mail offers that may be more honest but just as annoying. After years of opposing spam legislation, the DMA endorsed the Can-Spam Act, in part because it preempts stiffer state laws.

A tougher California law would have let consumers sue spammers and advertisers starting Jan. 1. The federal bill doesn't have such provisions.

"The federal bill makes the strongest elements of a state law like California's moot," says Deborah Thoren-Peden, an attorney who is a spam expert.

However, technology experts suggest that it may be impossible for legislation passed by one state or country to eliminate the global spam problem.

The new federal law also could endanger consumers, opponents say, because it authorizes the Federal Trade Commission to establish a "do-not-spam" registry.

That registry, containing millions of consumer e-mail addresses, will become "an irresistible target" for spammers and hackers to crack, says Edward Naughton, a high-tech attorney.

Online school data good news  and overdue
The announcement that within a year Virginia will put extensive pertinent data about every Virginia public school on the Web for all to see is good news indeed - and overdue. Such data should have been made available to the public (through the schools themselves, through newspapers) generations ago, and certainly beginning in the immediate aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education. For prospectively getting it done, give Governor Warner an "A."

— Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial

Staunton embraces e-gov

Staunton has hired its first Web master  and the results are impressive.

On a recent day, the front page of the site featured links to a Homeland Security alert, tips on dealing with the flu, Code of Virginia requirements for Christmas trees and the latest goings-on involving Staunton City Council.

The site is located at:www.staunton.va.us

The Council links included a detailed agenda of city council's most recent meeting and links to staff reports on the various subjects that were brought up at the pow-wow.

Staunton city manager Bob Stripling had a clean slate in the area of Web affairs when he arrived in town. The city-government job roster had a public-information-officer position waiting to be filled. "We took a good look at the job description, and one of the points of emphasis that we came up with was finding someone who could serve as a Web master for the city government Web site," Stripling said.

"We wanted someone in the job who could develop and manage a first-class Web site for the city so that we could serve our (employees and) city residents, in an efficient way as possible," Stripling said.

"In the past, it might have taken us days, even weeks, to get information out to the public about something that was going on that might be of interest. Now it can literally be minutes," Stripling said.

Neighboring Waynesboro and Augusta County both make efforts to post meeting agendas before their meetings are to take place. But neither posts detailed staff reports on issues to be discussed.

Staff reports are made available to members of the governing bodies before the meeting. And, by law - §2.2-3707(f) - "At least one copy of all agenda packets and, unless exempt, all materials furnished to members of a public body for a meeting, shall be made available for public inspection at the same time such documents are furnished to the members of the public body."

But again, as with other requirements related to government-meeting notices, there is no requirement that this information be posted on the Web.

The state code is also mum on when governing bodies should post minutes - on the Web or otherwise. State-government bodies are required under FOIA to post draft minutes to the Web within 10 days of a meeting; and are also required to post official minutes within three days of them being approved.

— adapted from the Augusta Free Press