Center: Your city's Web site and technology applications have certainly been on the Center's radar. Why is it important for you as a mayor to push technology initiatives as you have been doing?
Mayor Harris:In the mid-90s our city was hit with a deep recession while the rest of the United State was enjoying an economic boom. Our economy tracked the Japanese economy, and when its economic bubble burst, so did our economy. Because of the Japanese speculation in real estate, we lost about $20 billion (with a "B") worth of property value, and of course, real property taxes are what run city government in Hawaii.
So in the latter half of the 90s, we were faced with an enormous drop in revenue, but also a growing population and need for services. We made a strategic decision that we were going to invest heavily in technology with the belief that it would enable us to improve services, and at the same time, cut costs.
At that time, we had no city Web site. We had a few computers (there were Wang computers here and there in various departments). We had little use of technology involved in service delivery. As a result, we made a decision that we were going to invest in technology strategically to deal with this crunch on city revenues.
One of the first things we did was build a Web site to deliver more services over the Internet and reduce costs. Our belief is if someone can get a piece of city business done without having to visit a satellite city hall, it's going to save us salary costs for people we hire behind the desk and it's going to save facilities costs since we don't have to expand city hall.
Now we have an extremely successful Web site that gets about 16 million hits a month -- and we're able to deliver lots of services and information that otherwise would have required people standing at counters asking for service.
Harrington: One of my favorite stories when I give speeches is the mayor's mandate that crystallizes this whole area. The mandate was that he wanted to build a virtual city. He said, "I want a city where people can do business from any computer anywhere in the world."
Mayor Harris: I have expanded that mandate, and Courtney has been an inspiration and guiding force behind it; but also all of our people have now focused on technology as a strategic tool.
Obviously one challenge in addition to delivering services was improving the economy to get us out of the recession we were in. We applied an IT initiative to our economic development Web site -- and this has been extraordinarily successful. For example, if you are a businessperson in New York and you want to consider selling widgets in Hawaii, you can find out all of the commercial properties that are for sale in Honolulu and all of the information about the property. You can choose any radius around a piece of property that is for sale and our Web site will tell you complete demographics within that radius, who are the people who live there, how much money they make, how they spend their money, their travel patterns, etc. You can also find what is the workforce like in any given radius to identify if you're going to be able to find qualified people to run your business. What are all of the utilities, zoning, infrastructure, roadway systems, etc.?
Harrington: We even break it down by traffic counts, economic status of the people within this radius, how much education they have, the type of house they own, and the type of people living in the house, etc. All of this data is delivered on the fly. It's not canned. It's updated quarterly from the Census Bureau, Dunn and Bradstreet and other people we contract with to gather information.
All of this information is then put into a massive GIS database so when users pick the property and the radius, the query goes into this GIS database and pulls relevant data. If you wanted to create a list, there are probably 15 or 20 different categories it reports on.
Mayor Harris: And at the same time, you can pull information related to satellite imagery and any piece of property on the island, and economic reports on sectors for the island (technology, etc.). It has been enormously successful, getting about a quarter-million hits a month on just that property locator economic development Web site. We see it as an important tool in turning our economy around.
Of course, we also focused on -- in addition to developing the Web services -- reducing paperwork in the city as another efficiency and cost-reduction mechanism. As a result, we turned our attention toward workflow systems and the elimination of the paper chase. It has been successful as well.
Harrington: Government runs on forms. The first thing we did was sit down and count how many forms we had in the city. We had more than 500 forms. Obviously, there are about 100 used on a common basis. All of these are now electronic and are no longer put into a typewriter, filled out and stuck into an envelope for an interoffice messenger to pull stacks of forms around on a wagon. Now you pull up the form on your computer, fill it out, click on submit, and it knows where to go in a millisecond. You can actually submit a vacation form and have it all approved and back in the person's hands in less than 10 seconds.
Mayor Harris: The workflow has paid off for us. We've calculated a cost reduction in the last two years of about $7 million.
Harrington: Yes, that's it. Most of your costs for paper, purchase (your average piece of paper is about 13-16 cents per sheet to buy and store it), and we've cut back about 30 million sheets of paper.
Mayor Harris: So, it has been very successful for us. But again, the philosophy was investing in technology. Of course, it was not only IT technology, but also automated technology. We automated things like the refuge trucks so that instead of a three-person crew doing the heavy lifting, it was one person in an automated truck with a robotic arm, which increased the amount of garbage picked up by 50 percent a day, and it reduced the workforce from three people to one person per truck. It was an enormous increase in efficiency. We're servicing more households now and it's costing $6.5 million a year less to do the job.
We're also doing massive amounts of sewer work. We're using sophisticated micro-tunneling and a computer-controlled unmanned drilling apparatus to trench through city streets.
All of these programs are designed around improving efficiency in the way we do things. For example, how we read water meters. Instead of going house to house and reading the meter and calculating how much water was used, now we have telemetry on all of the meters. If a person needs to drive down the street past residences, through telemetry his computer is already determining how much water on the street was used. So one person is able to read thousands of meters in a day instead of a whole cadre of people out reading just a handful.
We've also been working to improve the efficiency of our bus system. We put GPS on all of our busses, emergency vehicles, parks vehicles and others; but with busses all of them are outfitted with GPS and my quip to community groups is, "The bus knows exactly where it is even if the driver doesn't know where he or she is." The bus is able to automatically report what the next stop is both visually and audibly without the driver having to be involved or interrupted, which is helpful for a community with so many tourists in it, because they're being told what each stop is and what is coming up.
Harrington: The mayor has been deeply concerned about the common term, the digital divide. Here in Hawaii it has been a little strange from the government set up. The state runs the library systems, not the counties -- and the state has not put much in the libraries in the way of public access. We have 23 regional parks (regional park has a building or a recreational center, gymnasium, etc.), and we went out to them and created a room where there is a bank of computers, printers and Internet access. The public can go to any one of these parks -- just like they would a cyber center -- and be able to use the computers to access the Internet, do homework or access the city's network for city services. We've concentrated those centers in areas of the island where the number or the percentage of the population is greatest that doesn't have Internet access or computers at home.
Mayor Harris: Our GIS system has also been vital to reduction of our staff needs for a variety of positions. It revolutionized the management, development and maintenance of our infrastructure. Now with our latest development of the digital-fly-through capability for our downtown, we have a tool to be used for decision-making on zoning and urban design, but also for areas such as civil defense, emergency response (e.g. terrorist act or hostage situation). The system allows us to call up floor plans for any rooms, say, in high rises, infrastructure information, property taxes paid, etc. It's an enormously effective tool for a variety of things, including interfacing with the public to have them understand, for example, what a development proposal is going to mean for downtown, how it is going to relate to the buildings around it, etc.
Harrington: And GIS hasn't even achieved its potential yet. The focus has been on land use, planning, infrastructure and more. Now people have opened their eyes and been amazed at what it can do. As a result, it is starting to move throughout the city in all kinds of areas. It's an exciting technology that we promote to Asian-Pacific countries that are just getting started building their cities. It is probably one of the primary focuses we have in the area at the moment.
