Received an email this morning from our City Clerk, Cindy Payton.
“Hey Pete,
I read this article and found it interesting….” The article she was referring was in yesterday’s Flint Journal on the City of Fenton creating a web page. Fenton is in the process of creating a web page and hope to have it up and running in 2006.
According to the article the city of Fenton will pay Creative Web Spinner of Fenton $19,800 to set up the Web site and $650 per month to maintain it. Cindy is not the only one who has mentioned this article to me.
Most people I spoke with have a common thread in their questioning. The question start out with something like “That seems expensive, doesn’t it?” and eventually goes into “How much do we pay?”
The City of Davison has done our web site in-house since about 2000. Dennis Miller, our director of building services, has been our in-house guru. We have utilized off the shelf software and have tweaked the site to make improvements. Our annual cost is around $600.
Our site has been about 26,000 visitors. A big improvement was when we put our property files on the site. Now realtors can get most of the public information they need from their own offices. This also frees up office staff time that use to have to get the information on property from any inquiry.
This brings us back to the question of “is $20,000 to much to spend on developing a web site?” My definitive answer is, it depends. It sounds like from what Chris Wren is stating they are going to be a fully interactive site where people can do business with the city 24/7. If that is the case, I know you couldn’t staff city hall 24/7 for $20,000 per year, yet alone a one time shot.
Times have changed. (remind you of a previous blog?)
Cities across the State of Michigan are all challenged with “doing more with less $$$$”. So this might lead to the next generation of services that we can provide and the cost benefit might work out better that one thinks.
One idea that I would like to see is e-billing. Can you imagine what cost savings in postage alone if we could electronically send out bills for water and sewer every month?
Ah… The future of governmental service is going to be exciting.