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THE 50 STATES

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What’s up in your agency?
For governments east of the Mississippi, call Donna Young at 301-650-2145 or e-mail dyoung@gcn.com. For those west, call Trudy Walsh at 301-650-2238 or e-mail twalsh@gcn.com.


Visitors to Alaska’s Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel Web site, at www.dot.state.ak.us/
whittiertunnel/virtualdrive.htm, can take a virtual drive through the 2.5-mile tunnel.


ALABAMA
HI, DAD. The Public Health Department has posted information on its Web site to help Alabama-born adoptees get copies of their original birth certificates.

An Alabama law that took effect Aug. 1 lets adoptees over the age of 19 see sealed records that name their biological parents. The site, at www.alapubhealth.org, also lets birth parents place information about their willingness to be contacted and medical history with their adopted child’s original birth certificate.

ALASKA
TUNNEL VISION. North America’s longest highway tunnel, the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, recently opened for automobile traffic. Anderson was a former mayor of Anchorage and the Army engineer who led the construction of the original 2.5-mile railroad tunnel in the 1940s.

The Transportation Department worked with HDR Alaska Inc. of Anchorage to build a Web site using Microsoft FrontPage that lets visitors take a virtual drive through the tunnel by clicking on hyperlinks at www.dot.state.ak.us/whittiertunnel/virtualdrive.htm.

ARIZONA
WISH YOU WERE HERE. The Office of Tourism offers visitors a chance to send free virtual postcards of Arizona scenery to anyone with an e-mail address.

Arizona tourism officials worked with the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix to build the site, at www.arizonaguide.com/postcards, using ColdFusion Version 4.5 from Allaire Corp. of Cambridge, Mass.


Arizona’s Office of Tourism Web site, at www.arizonaguide.com/postcards, lets visitors send free virtual postcards of Arizona scenery.


 ARKANSAS
MOBILE MANSION. Gov. Mike Huckabee and first lady Janet Huckabee recently moved into a mobile home while the governor’s mansion is renovated to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The $100,000 trailer home has at least two fiber-optic cable connections, said Gary Underwood, spokesman for the governor’s office.

Huckabee likes to catch up with his e-mail on a Gateway 433-MHz Solo 9300cs Deluxe notebook PC with 64M of RAM and Celeron processor, Underwood said.

CALIFORNIA
BUSY BEE. The Sacramento CITeCenter Internet portal last month began accepting online parking ticket payments. Citizens can pay tickets online at www.citecenter.com or www.sacbee.com, the Web site of the Sacramento Bee newspaper, one of the sponsors of the CITeCenter portal.

Hansen Information Technologies Inc. of Sacramento worked with officials from the city and the Sacramento Bee to develop the site, which uses digital certificates, the Secure Sockets Layer protocol and 128-bit encryption to secure online payments.

COLORADO
MERIT SCHOLAR. Jeff Hulse, a graduating senior at Columbine High School, was the first person to win the Dave Sanders Memorial information technology scholarship. The scholarship was established last summer by the Mile High Chapter of the Association of IT Professionals in memory of Dave Sanders, a teacher at the high school who was killed during the school shooting on April 20 last year [GCN/State&Local, July 1999, Page 4]. Sanders ran the computer lab at Columbine.

CONNECTICUT
SMART MOVE. The Information Technology Department is establishing a new data center to consolidate its systems and has hired Meta Group Inc. of Stamford to help implement the state’s enterprisewide technology architecture plan. The department has a $12 million budget to create a data center in the old Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. building in Hartford.

Rock Regan, Connecticut’s chief information officer, said the ETA plan arose from the need for departments to share information across state systems.

“The current systems weren’t designed to talk to each other because agencies were used to protecting their own information. Information is power,” he said. “But now there is a need for rapid sharing of information.”

Regan said the ETA plan will be completed by the end of the year.

DELAWARE
RIGHT DIRECTION. The Labor Department launched Career Directions, an interactive Web site, to assist job seekers. The site, at delawareworks.com, uses geographic information systems to create maps with directions to job sites, including public transportation routes.

The maps also point out educational institutions, child care centers, businesses and training facilities within three miles of a user’s home or workplace.

Officials used ArcView GIS from Environmental Systems Research Institute of Redlands, Calif., to build the database. They constructed the site using ESRI’s MapObjects, MapObjects IMS and RouteMap IMS, which run under Microsoft Windows NT.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
EASY RIDER. The Motor Vehicles Department is using digital technology for driver’s licenses to make the renewal process easier for drivers and help prevent fraud. DMV is using a capture station application that was customized by Polaroid Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., and runs under Microsoft Windows NT.

The system keeps digitized photos, signatures and fingerprints permanently on file so drivers can renew licenses either online or by mail. The digitized licensing system links with the DMV’s legacy database, but the agency is contracting with Deloitte Consulting of New York to upgrade it.

DMV will implement the new system next year; it will run PowerBuilder Enterprise from Sybase Inc. of Emeryville, Calif., and IBM‘s DB2 Universal Database.

FLORIDA
EMPOWERED. The state is partnering with PowerUP Inc., a nonprofit organization in McLean, Va., to set up 25 computer labs in communities throughout the state. Florida Senate bill 406 provides $500,000 to bring computers and the Internet to children in underserved cities.

Each lab will be equipped with at least 10 Gateway 650-MHz Pentium III GP7 PCs with 64M of RAM. America Online Inc. is donating educational software, and Intermedia Communications Inc. of Tampa will provide lab wiring services. Universal Studios Orlando is giving $10,000 plus employee mentors.

GEORGIA
TOP BILLING. The Fulton County Tax Assessor’s Office adopted Imagine 8.4 geographic imaging software from Erdas Inc. of Atlanta to help generate more accurate maps for appraisals. The county, which includes Atlanta, has experienced a 38 percent increase in the appraised value of taxable land.

The software runs under SunSoft Solaris.

HAWAII
OFFENDERS ONLINE. The Criminal Justice Data Center (CJDC) last month posted its database of registered sex offenders at www.ehawaiigov.org/HI_SORwww.ehawaiigov.org/HI_SOR. The site includes offenders’ photos, convictions, addresses, employers, and vehicle model and year.

CJDC officials worked in a partnership with the Hawaii Information Consortium of Honolulu, a division of the National Information Consortium of Overland Park, Kan.

IDAHO
DIGITAL DEAN’S LIST. Idaho tied for third in the nation in the recent Digital State survey of technology progress.

In the category of digital democracy, Idaho received a score of 90.5 out of 100 points in the survey by the Center for Digital Government of Sacramento, Calif., in conjunction with the Progress and Freedom Foundation of Washington, D.C., both independent research groups.

The state won praise for informative Web sites maintained by the Administration Department, the Legislative Services Office and the judiciary branch, and the state’s official Web portal, at www.accessidaho.org.

ILLINOIS
CLICK AND TRACTOR. Tech Town 2000 at the Illinois state fair showcases online services available from the state government.

The exhibits highlight Illinois’ new state homepage, the state’s labor recruitment system called Illinois Skills Match, online professional licensing by the Professional Regulation Department and assistive technology for the disabled, as well as several other state information technology projects.

Illini can view the state fair action through several webcams, including www.state.il.us/iisvideo/webcam/tech.htm.

INDIANA
CONTRACT WATCH. The state is offering a direct e-mail service that notifies subscribers about upcoming bids for the departments of Transportation, Administration and Public Works, and the State Armory Board and Hoosier Lottery.

The service sends subscribers, for $35 per month, the agency name, a link to the agency’s Web site where they can access the request for proposals, the name of the project, a brief description, and the closing date and time.

The state uses BidWatch, a customized application developed by Indiana Interactive of Indianapolis, for the e-mail service.

IOWA
RULES OF THE GAME. The Information Technology Department is developing a document management system that will largely automate the rulemaking process and let state employees conduct sophisticated searches of the state’s administrative rules.

The Administrative Rules Terminal is available on the state intranet. ART uses a search engine built by ITD computer specialists and programmers from RSM McGladrey Inc. of Davenport. ART, which runs Lotus Domino under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, resides on a 500-MHz Pentium III Compaq ProLiant 5500 Server with 256M of RAM and an 18G RAID storage subsystem.

KANSAS
FAMOUS KAMIS. The Department on Aging recently launched the Kansas Aging Management Information System to track data about 56,000 elderly Kansans who receive in-home care or community care services.

KAMIS is a Java client-server system running over the state’s established frame-relay network, the Kansas Wide Area Information network, said Steve Johnson, director of information services for the department.

KAMIS runs on a 300-MHz Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup application server with an UltraSparc II processor and 128M of RAM and a 250-MHz Sun Enterprise 3000 midrange database server with an UltraSparc processor and 256M of RAM that accesses an Oracle8 database. The system links 11 area offices throughout the state.

KENTUCKY
MONEY TALKS. The Office for Technology has adjusted the rates it charges state agencies for computer and telecommunications services. The changes represent an increase of about 7 percent compared to last year’s fees.

But officials in the governor’s office said the actual cost to agencies would change little because the state has eliminated a support services charge it previously levied.

The office charges agencies $44 to $52 an hour for most support services. The agency provides a firewall analyst for $80 per hour and administers a firewall server for $1,625 per month. It charges $24 monthly for local telephone service and 7 cents a minute for long-distance service.

During fiscal 2001, which began in July, the office expects to take in about $56 million based on the new rates.

LOUISIANA
BAYOU BUYERS. The Administration Division’s Office of State Purchasing plans to award a contract in mid-October for Hewlett-Packard Co. PCs, and related peripherals and support, including monitors, keyboards and system configuration. Louisiana officials estimate the value of the contract to be $11.8 million. Bids were due last month.
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