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Serving Southern Md. through their servers
County government sites bring power of information to the people
Friday, June 26, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Bob Kelly, director of information technology for St. Mary's County government, works among the computer and network infrastructure housed in the Public Safety Building in Leonardtown.
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When it snows, parents — and their children — don't want to wait to hear if schools are closed. When the weather turns violent, people want a direct avenue of information. The local governments of Southern Maryland have tools to notify citizens in times of emergencies and their Web sites are one of them — as long as the electricity stays on.
When there is no emergency, county government Web sites strive to be a catch-all source of information for Southern Marylanders, and each attracts tens of thousands of visitors every month.
Charles County leads the way overall, winning national awards year after year for its Web site, on par with the largest metropolitan counties in Maryland.
St. Mary's boasts a powerful geographical information systems page (GIS). Calvert has made leaps from where it was just a year ago to bring public information to its citizens.
Keep it simple
A Web site should be fast, accessible and have current information, said Bob Kelly, information technology director for St. Mary's County government. If those components aren't there, you've lost the browser to someplace else, he said.
The pages and functions should be "accessible [and] pleasant to most users," he said.
"The average person hits three pages" on a visit, he said, and there are about 30,000 individual visitors to the Web portal every month.
"That's at least a third of the population" in St. Mary's, said Karen Everett, public information officer.
Visitors start at the main page, which gets the most hits every month, about 28,500 in St. Mary's, where agendas, meeting minutes, news releases and all kinds of other information can be found. Second in popularity is the department of public works and transportation page, then recreation and parks and then human resources, as people check for job vacancies.
The most requested pages on the Charles County Web are animal control and pay online. Charles County maintains the page for the Tri-County Animal Shelter in Hughesville, where pictures of animals up for adoption are posted.
On Calvert's Web page, users visit the employment and parks and recreation pages most often. "The thing we tried to focus on best we could was a two-click" access to information, said Joe Klausner, director of technology services in Calvert County.
In the flow of information, "sometimes it can be too detailed, especially with county government; there's so much going on," said R. Mark Volland, Calvert public information specialist. If a park is closed because of bad weather, a person should be able to find out within two clicks on the Web site. Klausner said he would challenge the other two counties to provide updates in two clicks or less.
Over a recent 30-day period, the Calvert Web site had more than 49,000 visitors, an increase of 8 percent over the month before, said Amy O'Conner, systems analyst.
Charles County's Web site sees 30,000 unique visitors a month, with an average of 330,000 hits on pages.
Richard Aldridge, director of the Charles County Department of Information Technology, said the county's Web site "changes dynamically because we want to serve the public."
For the past six years, Charles County has won the award as nation's most digitally advanced county for its size — a population of 150,000 or less — from the Center for Digital Government. There are 2,786 counties across the nation in that category, Aldridge said.
Aldridge places the Charles County Web site with larger jurisdictions such as Montgomery and Baltimore counties, where millions are spent on their pages each year. "I wouldn't actually compare us to St. Mary's or Calvert," he said, in the variety of services offered.
"My hope is that we're pretty similar," Kelly said. "It's not a competition" among the IT directors in the three counties.
"There is no competition. There is no reason to compete," Aldridge said. "We share constantly."
Time is of the essence
When a severe storm is approaching, school is closing early or any other emergencies arise, people don't want to be left in the dark.
All three counties offer emergency notifications to the citizenry via e-mail, land line or cell phone.
In Charles, a citizen notification system sends e-mails or text messages to phones with messages about anything from snowstorms to a county commissioner meeting agenda. "We let anybody in the county sign up for this," and the user can select what kind of notifications he or she wants. "I think this is one of our biggest features," Aldridge said.
The system is maintained in house. The department of information technology, with 22 employees, has had zero turnover in the past 10 years, Aldridge said.
Calvert and St. Mary's counties contract with the Code Red system to provide emergency notifications by phone.
Code Red in St. Mary's is tied directly to the National Weather Service so when an emergency weather alert is issued, those who have signed up can get that alert on their phone. About 7,600 people have signed up for the service. The service can make up to 2,000 calls a minute and the department of public safety uses it to send out calls in areas that are experiencing an emergency. It was used when coastal flooding threatened homes on the Potomac River during Tropical Storm Ernesto on Sept. 1, 2006.
From July 2008 to June 3 of this year, 25,505 calls went out in St. Mary's from the system for weather notifications, Everett said.
St. Mary's government pays $25,000 a year for its Code Red system for its maintenance, and another $12,500 for the weather calls.
There are 32,000 households signed up with Code Red in Calvert, Volland said, and the annual maintenance cost is $25,000. The system was used for such incidents as water outages and on May 29, police sought the public's assistance locating a suicidal male in the Lusby area, Volland said.
The view from above
Functions like Google Earth allow for satellite views of your house, your neighbor's house, cities, other countries and faraway islands.
Calvert and St. Mary's both offer more detailed, aerial views of those peninsulas on their GIS pages.
Calvert's pages came online a little more than a month ago and use aerial shots of the county from 2007, as St. Mary's does. "This is actually flown from an aircraft so you can zoom in a lot closer," said Eric Pate, GIS analyst for Calvert government.
One of the map's features is the ability to select a private or public school in the county and have it zoom to the location. Other public facilities can also be located the same way, in relation to one's own address. It is the first map to make the public aware of the geographic location of public services in the county, Pate said.
However, the Calvert maps don't show lot lines, topographic lines, property information or zoning. St. Mary's County's GIS maps do. "I think we do a bad job touting ... how much we do," Kelly said.
Anyone can find out the ownership and history of a property through the links of the pages, see where the critical area boundary near the shoreline lies, or what the land looked like 10 years ago.
Charles County's GIS is a different animal. It doesn't show aerial views, but businesses can search for property for sale or rent by size of the parcel and cost and a map will bring up qualifying locations.
Getting things done
In Calvert, citizens can pay their personal and real-estate taxes online, and look up the status of building or business permits. People on Charles County's site can pay their property taxes, utility bills, parking tickets or red light citations.
St. Mary's lags there. There is an issue of securing credit card information according to federal guidelines that has to be worked through, Kelly said.
All government is local
Most people may never personally speak to the president of the United States, or their U.S. senators, but access to county commissioners in Southern Maryland is wide open.
And all county commissioner meetings are available online on their county's Web sites.
"We're a very first-class production," Aldridge said of the meeting videos, which date back to 2006. Everything said in the meetings is transcribed for closed captioning. In addition, "it is a transcript of the meeting so you can search it" for keywords, he said.
Calvert has a feature that allows a viewer to skip ahead in the meeting based on an agenda item, which has a link on the menu next to the video screen. It takes the viewer to that point in the discussion.
St. Mary's has commissioner agendas and meetings online, but there is no way to jump to a specific part of the meeting without plowing through the video. However, the St. Mary's commissioner meetings can be watched live online.
Where to find them online
Calvert County government www.co.cal.md.us/ Charles County government www.charlescounty.org St. Mary's County government www.stmarysmd.com
