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Extracted from Consolidated Report

This investigation was originally published as part of a larger consolidated report containing multiple investigations. View the consolidated PDF for the complete document.

Monterey County Grand Jury • 2013-2014

Monterey County Website Issues Information Access and the Need for Re-design*

Published: June 13, 2014 8 pages

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⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.

⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.

Findings 6 findings

County IT Department. These hosting costs are borne by the County IT Department. With central direction and input as to the content desired from the County Public Information Officer (PIO), the IT department creates and maintains the home page and initial basic access and design features.

Some of the County departments appear to create and maintain their own sections of the website, and some even host those sections elsewhere than on the Monterey County IT servers, at third party sites. The IT department staff of technicians, web developers and graphic artists is available for technical assistance to the County departments upon request, for a fee chargeable to the requesting agency.

In our review process of the Monterey County website, we felt it valuable to compare our user experience with that website to our experiences with three other California counties, representing a cross section of size, population and economies. We were also interested in how the website activities were funded. We arbitrarily selected the Kern County, Marin County and Placer County websites as examples. Kern is twice the population of Monterey County but has similar sized businesses and agricultural activities, cities, and large unincorporated areas under county jurisdiction. Marin has half the population of Monterey County and fewer agricultural areas, but has similar major governmental concerns. Placer County was selected since it has nearly the same population, business and agricultural activities as Monterey County and has an excellent, well presented website that we felt Monterey County could learn from by example. Monterey County Website Issues

From this review we also learned that Placer County has created, and apparently maintained, an Administrative Services Department, within which IT exists as a General Fund Division with responsibility for maintaining and operating the Placer County website. While we do not suggest that the IT department should be part of another larger department, we do think it useful to quote and consider the clear purposes stated in the 2013-14 Placer Proposed Budget. It says: "In order to maintain the level of service the County provides to its citizens, future investment in technology replacement will be an important consideration for ensuring the County's continuity of operation. For example, progress on the County's website redesign and functionality from a Department-centric site to a Public-centric site continues. Last year alone the website had over 2.4 million visits, resulting in more than 7.7 million pages being viewed. The website will focus on helping people accomplish their primary tasks quickly and easily. Content will be consolidated, organized, and user intuitive. Menus and navigation tools will be organized in a way that simplifies the use of the County's website." . In our judgment, this budgeting approach, as opposed to Monterey's Zero-based budgeting, creates an environment that is more conducive of cooperation and consistency of the website because of cost sharing, while this budget method also places on each department content responsibility and determining for itself what the citizens need from it. It allows the website to serve not only the public but also its county employees, in sections of the website created solely for them and not available to the public. On the other hand the Monterey County method of funding costs, quoted on its County website, discourages this cooperative environment.

The Monterey County Budget 2013-14 document describes the current method of funding the Information Technology Department ("ITD") as follows: "ITD is a zero General Fund Contribution department where its budget is solely based on the revenue generated through the services rendered to its clients."

We also feel that the Marin and Kern county websites are more representative of what the CGJ believes the Monterey County website should look like and how it should function, once some standard principles of development and operation, and rules for responsibility for information accuracy, are adopted and applied. We acknowledge that this will take considerable time and patience on the part of the many people and departments involved.

Recommendations 6

R1

This CGJ is not an advocate of complex sets of rules and procedures imposed on each of the County departments and agencies, since this creates time consuming and expensive Monterey County Website Issues requirements that makes government less responsive to its citizens. However, in this situation there needs, at least, to be: (a) a commonly agreed upon set of written principles governing the creation and design, information presentation and templates to be used; (b) a provision for review by some designated party, such as the IT website head, for compliance before posting of new sections; and (c) a requirement that each department regularly review, and correct errors, in those materials that have been posted for accuracy and currency of the information. These principles need to be worked out by a representative committee consisting of managers of IT functions in each department, and the CAO or one of his deputies, and chaired by the IT department representative who is most likely to have the technical expertise necessary. The guiding principle should make clear that it is up to each department to decide what
R2

public information about its operations is relevant and useful for posting. This then places the responsibility on departmental management for their portion of the County website. There is, however, certain minimum information that should always be there -- such as listing department functions and services available to the public, contact information in the form of telephone numbers and at least one central email address to reach the department, physical addresses of facilities, and perhaps a location map. Most departments should also list the names and functions of its personnel so the public can ascertain whom to contact within a given group.
R3

In order to create and operate a departmental section of the website, these rules need to provide permission for each department to contract out the development and/or operation of their section of the County site where necessary or more cost effective, but that any such development/operation entity contractually be required to conform with the template and technical specifications adopted by the website study committee. The contracts entered into with third party developers must also obligate them to follow the County general website rules and procedures, including Privacy and Data Breach laws as previously established by County Counsel and the IT department for protection of the County and its citizens. These rules should specify that the IT department, on behalf of the County, has the right
R4

to examine all developed materials and changes, other than merely updated data, prior to posting or use, and to certify or reject the proposed materials and changes for failure to comply with the common standards. New materials or sections that do not comply may need to be modified. In order not to delay important changes, time limits for review and compliance need to be established. In all instances of development and operation of the various departmental website
R5

sections, including the initial entry page to the website, careful consideration needs to be given to compliance with the multitude of Federal and State Privacy and Data Breach laws. The cost of non-compliance in the form of penalties, fines and class action litigation that might be incurred can be significant, to the point that in worst case situations, a major data breach of the County website and/or the IT department could bankrupt the County. We therefore suggest that a standing procedure for regular consultation with County Counsel be established, so that Counsel is aware of what legal notices are posted, what third party development and operation contracts exist or are contemplated, and that the departments are promptly apprised of the continual changes in these complex Privacy laws.
R6

Finally, we believe that the Board of Supervisors and the CAO should consider changing the current Zero Basis Budgeting of the IT department, for its duties involving website presentation and development, by adopting the so-called Enterprise Funding method. Under this method, each department would be required to pay at least a portion of the cost of development and of changes to the ITD for each budget year (based on head count). This would ensure a stronger financial incentive for the County Departments to work with the IT department rather than with outside developers. In addition, in most cases it makes no sense for the various departments to electronically host their own sections of the website or to contract out such duties to third party vendors. It is also far more cost effective to have the IT department serve as the central contact point for the website and to have the obligation of maintaining the initial, opening pages, which pages likely have general comments on how the County is organized, much of which information will likely be provided by the CAO and the County PIO. (See, the example above of how the Placer County website handles this.)

* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.