City Hall entering age of technology

Denise Cardinal

Friday, May 8, 1998 | 10 a.m.

Las Vegas City Hall's 18-year-old computer system -- a veritable fossil in technological years -- is getting an overhaul that has already cost the taxpayers $8.2 million.

Ultimately the new system, dubbed Virtual Las Vegas, will allow residents to receive services and information much more quickly than before, with most information accessible through the Internet by July 1.

Residents needing business licenses will soon be able to fill out the forms from their home computers. Developers will be able to check on the status of their permits instantaneously. Payroll will be computerized, rather than manually entered by data processors. All of City Hall will be interconnected on a faster system allowing for departments to send information to each other through the system, rather than having hard copies delivered by hand. All of the systems will be year-2000 compliant.

In short, City Hall will be brought into the '90s about a year and a half before the decade ends.

Since starting the arduous task more than a year ago, city officials have been criticized about the feasibility and cost of the project.

The stone-throwing stems from a series of outside and internal audits that looked at the overhaul's progress. The most recent, submitted March 13, said the city's project had "many internal-control weaknesses which still remain unresolved."

Observations made in the report include:

"We got what we asked for in that report," Marcella said, adding that the phrasing was almost brutal. "I've done and seen lots of audits. I've taught classes on it. This one was purely academic. There was no judgment, no thought to what might work in the real world."

He pointed out that, although it sounds great to overhaul an entire computer system , it's not just a matter of buying lots of equipment. He and his fledgling department have the responsibility of dragging the insides of an entire city across two decades.

"It's a bit of a baptism by fire," he said.

Virtual Las Vegas is the brainchild of soon-to-be-former City Manager Larry Barton, who announced his retirement earlier this year. Though the logistics were taken care of by his staff, it was through Barton-sponsored brainstorming sessions that the city's technological inadequacies were first exposed. A wide-reaching project emerged as the only answer to the city's computer woes.

"Our state of affairs is such that we can go in and really do a top-to-bottom remaking of the whole system," Deputy City Manager Steve Houchens said. "We could make the city a technological role model."

But the cost of the system -- $8.2 million and running -- has some questioning the need for such wide-reaching change. Especially when audit reports reveal faulty testing procedures and inadequate security measures.

Mark Vincent, the city's financial director, said that a city spending millions on a computer system is an easy target for critics. But when people have to wait in a long line to get their kids signed up for swimming lessons, they're the first to voice their support.

"It's great to jump on the bandwagon and say we need a new system that's faster," Vincent said. "But people have to realize it's a significant cost."

He said dollar figures are something taxpayers understand, but the time, effort and manpower that might be conserved through the installation of a new system is hard to measure.

"How do you monitor efficiency and the money that might be saved in five years?" he asked.

Traditionally, the city hasn't maintained a budget slot for upgrading its computer system like most private companies would. That's something Vincent is trying to change for the fiscal 1999 budget cycle.

"In the past, we haven't done a very good job of identifying what we need to do to upgrade," Vincent said. "Virtual Las Vegas is the first attempt at that. But once you dive in to technology, you have to keep pace. Many companies have a strategic plan of where they want to go, and we just began developing that here at the city."