STREAMLINING BUSINESS
City Hall Gets More Efficient, Despite a Hurricane (or Two)
New York Times, Apr 05, 2006, by Tedeschi, Bob
As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina subsided, the city of New Orleans faced a new deluge: requests from contractors and homeowners for permits to rebuild thousands of homes, businesses and municipal buildings.
But the city government was suffering its own crisis. Apart from the physical havoc the hurricane wreaked, much of the staff was gone, seeking refuge in other states. The city's inspection and permits team was less than half the size of its pre-hurricane level, while demand for permits was far greater than before.
What New Orleans needed was an efficiency rarely seen in even the best-run governments. So it turned to the Internet, where business-to-government commerce, involving transactions and other procedures, is becoming more common. The city's experience is the most notable example of how such transactions are faring.
"We had to inspect 110,000 homes in six weeks, and I had nobody to send out to do the inspections," said Greg Meffert, the city's chief technology officer. "There's not exactly a handbook on that."
Mr. Meffert addressed the problem by installing new software on dozens of Internet kiosks set up in public buildings citywide. About 90 days after the August storm passed, the new system was up and running. Now businesses and homeowners can type in the address of the home they need to have rebuilt, and the system does much of the rest.
It knows, for instance, that homes on certain parts of a given street have taken in four feet of water; it also knows the size of the home, the assessed value and the likely extent of damage. From there, it determines whether homeowners can rebuild (as opposed to demolish), and whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for it.
City Hall supervisors review the applications on the day they are filed. The next day, applicants can log on and print their building permits. The city knows the condition of the homes because it ascertained exactly how much water each precinct was under, and has preprogrammed the system to assess damage accordingly. If an application is outside the bounds of building ordinances, the permit will be denied. (If there is a questionable application, the city will send an inspector.)
"That was the lifeblood of the process," Mr. Meffert said. "That allowed us to get going with rebuilding the city."
Under the new system, the city has issued about 625 permits daily. Before the storm, Mr. Meffert said, the average was about 45 permits, and contractors and homeowners waited in line at City Hall for nearly two hours, sometimes much longer.
"They'd cut the line off at 2 o'clock just so they could close at 5," said Christopher Marino Jr., the general manager of Roman Builders in Slidell, La., north of New Orleans. "And after the storm, City Hall unlocked the doors at 8 a.m., and there'd be a line just to get into the elevator." Mr. Marino, whose company was based in New Orleans before Katrina, said he hired an employee just to sit in line for permits. "Now, instead of paying someone to do that for eight hours a week, I have to have someone do it for maybe three hours a month," he said.
Homeowners get another break from the new system, Mr. Marino said. Permits for a $90,000 renovation cost contractors about $500, whereas homeowners get them free, which is a posthurricane policy. "So they can get it themselves and not get aggravated at me because they think I'm overcharging," Mr. Marino said. "It helps me get jobs."
Paul W. Taylor, the chief strategy officer for the Center for Digital Government, a consultant firm in Folsom, Calif., said most of the strides made in business-to-government transactions have been in construction, as cities have tried to serve companies supporting the housing boom.
Over the last two years, in particular, Mr. Taylor said, governments have set up systems in which builders can communicate with city inspectors through wireless Internet devices to process and check the status of field inspection requests.
"That's allowed a huge amount of time and money savings for the building trades, and by extension, homeowners," Mr. Taylor said. "Plus, there's nary a complaint from inspectors being able to spend more time in the field, rather than going back and forth to their computers handling these kinds of requests."
Many cities have also moved the licensing and renewal process online, helping new companies determine which agencies require which licenses, and allowing executives to enter their information once, and feed it to the relevant agencies.
"Now these people can actually focus on running their businesses, instead of having to call or travel around to get all the relevant paperwork done," Mr. Taylor said.
E-commerce companies that build government-related applications said that their services were growing more complex, as municipal technology leaders responded better to their business constituency.
"Businesses have really been driven by their experiences with companies like FedEx, U.P.S. and Amazon," said Maury Blackman, a senior vice president of Accela, which produces software for government agencies, including the inspection software used in New Orleans. "Just like customers of those companies can see where their packages are at any given moment, businesses want to know exactly whose desk their application is sitting on in City Hall."
Mr. Blackman said that his company was working on systems that would help agencies simultaneously review architectural plans online, rather than circulating physical plans. The paper-shuffling now takes about six months. "We believe we can get that down to two months by collaborating online," he said.
Mr. Taylor of the Center for Digital Government said that word spreads quickly once a city agency cuts costs or serves businesses more efficiently online. "Digital government is one of those fast-following spaces," he said.
Which puts Mr. Meffert of New Orleans in the geek spotlight in a city not known for technology wizardry.
"It's pretty wild getting e-mails from some superhigh-tech cities asking me how we did that, then realizing, 'Wait a minute, I didn't have roads a few months ago,' " Mr. Meffert said. "But it's human nature. A lot of times you don't innovate unless you're forced to, and city halls typically have the luxury of not being forced to innovate."
EYE OF THE HURRICANE
Network World, Aug 21, 2006 by Greene, Tim
Once the waters subsided, the city needed to get people to rebuild, which involved applying for federal funds and issuing permits for demolition, building and renovating, says Michael Centineo.the city's director of safety and permits. Improvements that came out of the emergency effort to meet those demands will streamline administration permanently, he says.
Before the storm, the city had set up a Web portal to allow residents to fill out permit applications online, using an application from software vendor Accela. Online or at touch-screen appliances in the hallway outside the permit office, applicants could enter their own data before talking to city staff and, depending on what they entered, be placed in the appropriate queue for personal attention. This procedure paid off by saving people from hours of needless waiting, because applicants discovered quickly whether they lacked information they needed to retrieve.
The problem was that the maximum load on the permit system pre-Katrina was about 35 per day, and demand peaked at about 500 per day afterward, Centineo says. At the same time, budget cuts reduced permit staff from 127 to 60, he says, and only by expanding permit automation did his office keep up. "This department would have been frozen and inactive, because it would have been overwhelmed by the volume of requests," Centineo says.
Immediately after the storm, city programmers customized the building-permit interface of the Accela software to make it easier for untrained citizens to use, says Peter Bodenheimer, a city IT project manager who oversaw the code writing. "We like to go with custom code, so we don't have to rely on others' timetables," he says, "and we needed this done. We had people who were screaming."
Meffert says the city tried to make the user experience require as close to zero training as possible, because the system simply had to work; there was no alternative."We had to go to the extreme and have the user compatibility of Disneyland.You walk in, and you have a greeter to escort you to the kiosk box and explain how it works," he says.
Hitting the streets with Toughbooks
Eight weeks after the storm, the waters were gone and the city had to figure out the extent of damage and what buildings were safe to repopulate, Meffert says. That called for a whole new layer of bureaucracy for which the city had no infrastructure."We had to inspect 110,000 homes in six weeks. There was only one way: create a more simplified inspection process," he says.
So the city wrote its own damage-assessment application for gathering information the Federal Emergency Management Agency would want and loaded it onto 34 Panasonic Toughbook laptops with wireless cards and global positioning capabilities that inspection teams carried into devastated neighborhoods.
The laptops could call up digital records of individual properties via the Wi-Fi links, and inspectors verified and updated the data. The records had been geo-coded so records of property could be called up based on the location of the laptop as calculated by GPS. An inspector sent to a parcel of land where a building was washed away entirely, for instance, could still find the records of what had been there.
The updated database was made publicly available via the city Web portal and public kiosks. That's how we told people if their house was inspected or not," Meffert says."We had to create new [Wi-Fi] hot spots that would sync with the database."The database was also linked to a city map to differentiate inspected sites from uninspected ones, so inspectors could see where to go next.
Residents could use online access or public kiosks to find out the damage assessment for their property and staff was available to resolve disputes. Residents could fill in a Web form from home and get a reservation number to get them to an agent at a set time the next day.
With its success automating and Webifying building permits and the damage assessments, the city plans to add electrical, mechanical, air-conditioning, heat and gas permits to the Web process, Centineo says.
Self-service kiosks for the French Quarter
Another goal is to place weatherized kiosks outdoors in the French Quarter."We've seen what self-service can do," Bodenheimer says. Residents will be able to pay property taxes, parking tickets, research real estate transactions or find out what licenses have been issued for the construction going on next door. Whatever is available via the Web portal will be available at the kiosks. "Anything you can do that's city business online, we want to do with a kiosk.We want to make sure every citizen is served, not just those with computers," Bodenheimer says.
The program is being expanded to place kiosks in trailers in neighborhoods, so those without transportation or Internet access can get what they need within walking distance of home.The holdup is the trailers."lt seems like we're always waiting on trailers," Centineo says.
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