Two Texas counties received recognition in October from the Center for Digital Government, of Sacramento, for excellence in e-government.
Dallas County earned honors in the Center for Digital Government’s Best of Texas Program, established to salute IT professionals and local government organizations for their dedication, hard work and contributions in the state of Texas. Dallas County Commissioner Mike Cantrell received the Visionary Award for the Dallas County Juvenile Information System, and Dallas County received the Best Application Serving Multiple Jurisdictions distinction, also for the Dallas County Juvenile Information System.
The winners were selected based on a set of criteria including collaboration between agencies, innovative use of technology, and improvement of services to citizens or state employees.
Denton County was honored in the Center’s Best of the Web competition. The county was selected out of 250 entries to receive the 2005 Digital Government Achievement Award in the category “government-to-citizen” for its Web site. The award recognizes the nation’s most creative, advanced government Web sites and applications.
An E-Government Leader
The Denton County Web site delivers to an average 64,000 Internet users per day; 52,000 of these are return visitors. The site, administered by the Denton County Department of Information Services, provides extensive links to relevant sites such as the Denton County Appraisal District, various federal, state, and local agencies, as well as onsite searches for a variety of judicial records, parole hearing notices, and voter registration.
Denton was one of the first counties in the state to use the World Wide Web for publishing public information from the county court system. Beginning in the late 1990s, Denton County and its countywide software solutions provider, The Software Group, first made criminal and civil case records available to the public via the Internet with the Judicial Records Search feature.
Today’s online features, accessible from the home page www.dentoncounty.com, include:
1. Property Tax
2. Property Tax Appraisal
3. Landmark Map – Planning & GIS
4. E-Mail Tax Question
5. Jury Services
6. Tax Statement On-line
7. Bid Opportunities
8. Parole Notices
9. Vehicle Registration
10. Road and Bridge Project
11. Real Property Record Search
12. Driver License and ID Card Renewal
13. Voter Registration
14. Judicial Records Search
15. Commissioners Court Agendas, Supporting Documents and Minutes
16. E-mail Subscriptions
“Our newest services, E-mail Subscriptions and GIS Maps, have received great feedback from Denton County,” said Kevin Carr, director of information services. The E-mail Subscription, which now has 2,550 subscribers, “is the easiest way for people to get the most updated news from Denton County,” Carr said. An e-mail is sent out to subscribers every time there is a news update.
The GIS Map, or the Denton County Geographical Information Systems Landmark Viewer, is an interactive map that shows various sections of the county with landmarks based on input from the user. The user can choose to view county buildings, schools, fire districts, and other county-specific landmarks, which are presented to the user as layers on an html-based map. To view additional layers, one simply places a checkmark next to the appropriate layer title.
“As the user zooms in on the map, certain scaled data layers will be drawn,” Carr said. “This is so you don’t have to turn map data layers on and off.”
The county keeps usage records on several of its sites:
• Jury Services: http://www.jury.dentoncounty.com/: 18,234 unique visitors last year and with more expected this year.
• Voter Register: http://elections.dentoncounty.com/go.asp?Dept=82&Link=292: about 1,000 hits per month.
• Judicial Records Search: http://justice.dentoncounty.com: 178,307 unique visitors last year.
• Commissioners Court Agendas, Supporting Documents and Minutes: http://dentoncounty.com/dept/main.asp?Dept=123&Link=482: approximately 1,000 hits per month.
• Landmark Map – Planning & GIS: http://gis.dentoncounty.com/website/service/viewer.htm: average hits are between 2,800 – 3,500 hit per month.
For more information about Denton e-government features, contact Carr at 940-349-3001.
A Shared Approach
The Juvenile Information System (JIS) garnered two separate awards for Dallas County. Commissioner Mike Cantrell, who launched the JIS in 1998, received the Visionary Award, and the county at-large received the Best Application Serving Multiple Jurisdictions designation.
“I was very surprised and honored to receive the Visionary Award,” Cantrell said. “However, it took the vision and hard work of many people who were involved in the JIS project to bring it to fruition. Many of them stepped up and were willing to give up a certain amount of operational independence and control – and money – in order that all entities might benefit and so that local law enforcement could participate in an effective and meaningful information exchange.”
The JIS was designed as a secure, Internet-based application with a centralized database of juvenile information within Dallas County. Historically, each of the participating cities and municipalities in Dallas County maintained their own records and information systems and participated in a limited amount of information sharing and tracking of juvenile offenders. JIS provides participating agencies with the capability to share offense and criminal history information and make informed decisions regarding the early identification, control, supervision, and treatment of juvenile offenders.
The Dallas County JIS currently includes 93 agencies (45 police departments, 15 independent school districts, 15 municipal courts, 12 county departments and six charter schools) and 2,702 trained users. Forty-three of those agencies are using JIS as their primary processing and records management system for juveniles.
In addition, the JIS is in the process of being rolled out to seven additional counties. El Paso County has fully installed the application and is on the verge of going live, while Bexar, Collin, Denton, Kaufman, Rockwall and Tarrant counties are each in various stages of the implementation process.
“The JIS will certainly benefit from receiving the Best Application award not only from publicity for the system itself, but also from credibility and raised awareness about the technological options that are out there for local jurisdictions to increase their ability to manage crime in their local area,” Cantrell said.
Tools like the JIS will also form the foundation of a true homeland security system in Texas, enabling the collection and sharing of many more data elements in one common database than are currently available in most police records management systems, Cantrell continued.
The application creates a Juvenile Profile that summarizes the juvenile’s history with participating law enforcement, judicial, and educational agencies.
Other highlights of the system include basic and advanced search capabilities, ability to add/modify existing background information, ability to add a new juvenile to the system (if they are not currently in the system), automatic population of critical (carry-over) information on the required screens, generation of required preformatted forms, and the capability for agencies to generate essential reports from their information in the system.
Due to the sensitivity of the information contained in the JIS, the system provides a variety of security features. These include a secure Web server, confidential Web connection via 128-bit SSL encryption, Virtual Private Network, user authentication (username and strong password), multi-level security (dynamic access based on agency type and user roles within agency), and the capability to record and track changes through an audit trail.
For a complete list of JIS functions, go to http://www.jisinformation.dallascounty.org/jisfunct.html.
Does your county offer e-government services? If so, we’d like to hear about them.
Send an e-mail to describing the services you offer. We’ll include your information in a future article on Texas Counties and E-Government.
Julie Anderson, Editor