Byte by Bite

Projected cost of county web site investigated

by Marv Dealy

Published March 5, 2004

Recent editorials and articles in this newspaper concerning the $117,000 website being planned for Tuolumne County have been nagging at me. That seems like a lot of money for a website, I thought, so I telephoned District 4 Supervisor Mark Thornton to ask him where all that money was going.

Mark had Craig Pedro, Assistant CAO, return the phone call, and this led to several other calls in which Craig and others working on the project -- Gregg Jacob, Manager, ISS; Greg Hurt, Database Administrator; Daniel Richardson, Senior Administration Analyst; and Jim Sells, Webmaster -- were able to answer a number of questions about the project.

A couple of days after the initial call I received a package with a letter from Jim that went to great lengths to outline the county website project and break out the various costs. The package included a copy of the 2002 market study that will drive the overall website design, architecture and functionality.

I think the idea of a Tuolumne County portal website is a valid project. The portal will serve both county residents and employees alike on a number of different levels in a number of ways. Most other counties in California have already put similar websites online to serve both their residents and county staff.

Research for the development of a county website was performed by Patricia Jones Consulting with a report delivered to the county in March, 2002. While much has changed on the Internet in that time, the underlying assumptions have not.

When I asked what would be the primary benefits to county residents of the completed portal project, Jim Sells, county Webmaster said "Citizens will get a savings in cost and a lot of convenience. Benefits will include 24/7 information access, including contact names, phone numbers, information to download, forms to fill out, information on how to do things relating to permitting, the ability to pay taxes and fees, and other things."

Sells added that during a recent wildfire Calaveras County used a GIS mapping system on their county website to show residents where dangerous areas of fire were and how it was encroaching on their particular area. They didn't have to wait for someone on the radio to broadcast that information.

The Tuolumne County website project has taken a long time to get funded and get approved -- 6 or 7 years total according to Jacob. He said that there have been lots of changes in technology over the course of the project.

I asked Jacob what county staff would realize as primary benefits from the completed project. He noted that many departments depend on each other for information so they can do their work, such as with community development. The planning division has geographic information system and the GIS is only as good as the data. Central distribution will benefit the continual updating of this information, assuring any department who needs this data that they're working with the most current available.

Other benefits to county staffers will be realized through better communication between departments. Plans include having county supervisor board agendas posted in advance on the inward facing staff-only website and eventually on the outward facing (or public) portion of the website, along with backup information. This is entirely a paper process now.

This would mean that an interested citizen could review an upcoming agenda item, including all related backup documentation, prior to a board meeting, or could after the meeting review actions taken.

Sells said that conversations with other governmental website webmasters reflected a savings in reduced phone calls to public resource offices as citizens or staffers were able to find what they needed on the website. He noted that one city clerk's office was able to lower their workload by half.

Security of the information is a critical piece to the county's network structure. The county has lots of departments with very sensitive information, such as the hospital's medical records, sheriff office information, elections office information -- any particular department has lots of information stored electronically and security is paramount.

Jacob noted that "It's important that we make information available intra-department and to the public while maintaining the security of all information."

Other counties that are being used as models for Tuolumne's portal are San Mateo, Shasta and Nevada, all of which have completed portals similar to what Tuolumne is planning. The architecture and navigation planning for these sites was aided by involvement of the state of California librarian's office, who helped determine how best to make the navigation of the site obvious enough that a visitor could find the information they needed even when they didn't know which department would have that information.

Jacob noted that Dave Bloch of Nevada County said there was a concept of government without boundaries. "The hope is that any citizen can go to a county's website and find any governmental service that the city, county or state provide."

In 2001 San Mateo County turned to the California state portal team to help develop this intranet architecture, at which point the State librarian agreed to help. At that time Nevada county was in the midst of a major rebuild of their website and they joined in the effort. Soon after, Shasta and Santa Clara counties joined, and subsequently 18 counties including Tuolumne began to participate.

I asked what was the tentative timeline for completion of the internal and external web portals, and was told by Hurt that "One milestone is to do the intranet portal for employees by end of March; the outward facing version has a June 30th deadline."

Back to the original concern I had -- how is this all going to cost $117,000? It turns out that some of the budget is to cover items necessary whether or not the public portal is ever completed, such as additional bandwidth.

Jacob stated that "In our four major PeopleSoft applications we have 3 database servers, a dozen other servers, and four web servers, all of which are used internally in the county intranet. We need to build firewalls and proxy devices between those and the real world when they go through to the outward facing portal."

The hardware and software decisions are still in the design stage. Estimates of $29,000 have been made for hardware that is going on the perimeter for the outward facing portal.

Another substantial chunk of the total ($34,000) will go for additional high speed data lines -- a one time cost. There are presently a number of T1 lines connecting county offices, in addition to the single T1 that goes to the Internet and over which is received all incoming traffic such as e-mail, file downloads, etc. That line has been saturated for over a year, and even without adding the website the capability for more download needs to be expanded.

It was also noted that introducing the external website without the hardware and bandwidth improvements will result in a slow moving website that both staffers and citizens would find balky and hard to use.

Planners are currently working with SBC to bring in an ATM circuit, giving better capacity and scaleability. Said Jacob, "We have to figure out how to do that without all the drilling and blasting normally done."

The alternate is to aggregate additional T1 lines to bring the county up to the capacity needed, but that's a fixed solution that would require more T1s in the future. Some money budgeted for additional bandwidth goes to the physical equipment, some is fees to SBC, and some is a certain number of months actual service fees.

Matt Ashe, networking guru (who sat in on one of the phone calls with me) asked "What about connecting buildings with industrial wireless networking?"

Jacob responded "There are two things keeping us from going there. One is an existing investment in a physical plant, and the other is we're not comfortable introducing wireless in some of the security arrangement we have right now. We might not be up to total comfort in how it's used." He noted that he didn't want to be in charge when some computer nerd sat outside of a county building and hacked into a wireless system and had release papers drawn for a buddy in the county jail.

Marv Dealy is a lifelong computer enthusiast and businessman in Tuolumne County. Reach him by e-mail at marv.dealy@throck.com