E-government evolution: the Richardson, Texas, experience; after successfully managing the transition to e-government, the City of Richardson, Texas, continues to add to its electronic service portfolio.

• Author: Snavely, Edward C.
• Position: Brief Article

Editor's note: Each year GFOA bestows its prestigious Awards for Excellence to recognize outstanding contributions to the practice of government finance. This article describes the 2001 winning entry in the Management and Service Delivery category.

A recent study found that the number of Americans accessing information from government Web sites increased by 70 percent over the last two years to 68 million. (1) As this number continues to rise, citizens will come to expect more from these sites than basic information on governments and their services. Increasingly, citizen customers want to interact and transact business online with their governments. For the City of Richardson, Texas, where 60 percent of its 90,000 residents are connected to the Internet, moving services online only made sense. This article traces the city's steps as it evolved from the publishing stage of e-government to the transaction stage. (2) Although the process was not without challenges, the addition of electronic service delivery channels such as the city's searchable property tax database and online payment system has resulted in greater convenience for customers and greater efficiencies for the city.

Toward e-Government

After deciding to provide online services, the city's first priority was the development of an application that would allow citizens to view property tax information online. The vision for this application included several key characteristics. The database would have to be searchable by owner name, property address, and tax ID number. The search results obtained online would have to be available in both text and graphic formats and include a 10-year tax history for each property. This tax history would have to include a comparison of property tax rates in Richardson to the rates of other area cities. With these goals in mind, the Information Services Department used Lotus Notes' (the city's mail server) database capabilities to design and populate a property tax database application for online querying. After two and a half months of development and two weeks of testing and debugging, it was ready for public use.

In January 2001, the property tax application became the first to grace Richardson's Web site. Since its deployment, it has saved time for both taxpayers and city staff because property tax inquiries no longer require interpersonal contact either over the phone or at the customer service counter. Online search results detail a property's assessed value and the tax rate for the last 10 years, and display the owner of the property, the fair-market value thereof, and any exemptions. Web links direct taxpayers to information on how and where to pay property taxes and to comparative rate data for metro area cities and other taxing jurisdictions. The site also includes contact information for the tax offices of metro counties and the Internal Revenue Service. By the end of 2002, the city expects to be able to accept property tax payments online.

At approximately the same time the property tax application was released, officials of the city's Water Department recognized the need for an online payment system for water utility billing. The department's goal was to provide an easy way for citizens to pay their water utility bills online. While the IS Department worked to integrate the billing database with a user-friendly customer interface, the Finance Department was busy working out the details of online credit card payments. Integrating the various components of the online payment system, which was designed for maximum security and ease of use, took close to three and a half months, followed by two weeks of testing and debugging. Without...