Latest Web Pages Offering Keys to the Cities

Hoping to tap into a vast computer network linking millions worldwide, nearly every city in Ventura County is now clamoring to put information on the Internet to lure new businesses and make local government more accessible.

Simi Valley, Camarillo and Santa Paula are creating business-friendly sites on the World Wide Web to attract new companies.

Oxnard plans to post City Council agendas, minutes of meetings and even statistics on local strawberry production on its new home page.

Ojai will soon display trail maps of Los Padres National Forest for online hikers. And Ventura hopes to boost its tourist trade by placing a directory of hotels alongside digital images of surf and sun-drenched beaches.

“I think in the next six months, you will see every city up on the Net in some way,” Oxnard Planner Allan Moore said.

Thousand Oaks and Fillmore are the only cities that have not joined the Internet rush. Thousand Oaks already has a computer bulletin board for its residents, and Fillmore officials see no advantage to putting their tiny town online.

From Washington to Sacramento, government agencies increasingly have turned to computer technology as a way to streamline, modernize and humanize government.

The rush to put City Hall online has only recently taken hold in Ventura County, however, as cities from Port Hueneme to Moorpark begin to develop their own Web pages.

Last fall, Ventura County became the first local government agency to put information up on the global computer network known as the Internet. The county’s Web site began with just a list of the Board of Supervisors.

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But six months later, it has expanded to include information on 14 county departments captured on 42 pages, in addition to links to city pages as they come online.

With a computer and a modem, residents can now access school phone directories, listings of library hours, agendas of meetings, the cost of a dog license--all with the click of a computer mouse.

“The board members were really interested in making county government more accessible to the public,” said George Mathews, the county’s information services director.

“I think the value is that the data is readily available and it is easily navigable,” he said. “You certainly are going to see an interest among those who surf the Internet who want to see what is happening in their government.”

Indeed, accessing information via the Internet is far easier than wandering City Hall. A government home page is typically divided into sections by category and linked with colored words or pictures that allow users to jump from one subject to the next.

“You just click on words or pictures,” Ojai resident Andy Behar said. “It doesn’t feel like a computer, it feels like a television.”

In fact, a recent survey found that 24 million people in the United States and Canada spend as much time surfing the Internet as they do watching rented movies. A more conservative estimate put that figure at closer to 10 million.

While local public agencies have been slow to jump on the high-technology bandwagon, the private sector was quick to realize the business opportunities presented by millions of Internet browsers.

“Certainly, there are people who find it easier to conduct business over the computer,” said John Walters, president of the Greater Ventura Chamber of Commerce, which posted a Web site several months ago.

Potential links to computer-savvy businesses are what have attracted many cities to the Internet.

In Simi Valley, Camarillo and Santa Paula, officials are developing Web sites to promote their cities to global markets in an attempt to boost economic development.

“If we are able to attract one business to this city, it will pay for itself,” said Tal Ross, Simi Valley’s financial and information services manager. Simi Valley expects to spend less than $1,000 a year on a Web site, Ross said.

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Santa Paula City Manager Arnold Dowdy said for small cities such as his, the Internet is a valuable marketing tool.

“I think one of the major opportunities we have is spreading the message of what a great place we are,” Dowdy said. “A nice little video message about a town in sunny Southern California would play well in New Jersey in the middle of winter.”

The Ventura Visitors and Convention Bureau recently created a site to tout Ventura for Web-browsing tourists. In the competitive travel industry, a spot on the Internet is almost mandatory, director Bill Clawson said.

“I really hate to be as shallow as to say, ‘Everybody is doing it.’ But there is a great deal of pressure among visitors’ sites to be as close to the cutting edge without falling off,” he said.

Indeed, the rush to jump on the Internet is not without peril, some city officials say.

Creating a Web site can be expensive, and in a time of limited resources often requires a time commitment by at least one city staff member to update posted information.

“I have some hesitations,” said John Augustyn, information systems manager for the city of Thousand Oaks. “I don’t think it is a healthy pressure.”

In Thousand Oaks, city officials have shied away from the Internet-frenzy and concentrated on improving a year-old electronic bulletin board designed specifically for the city’s 112,000 residents.

A 1994 survey found that 65% of Thousand Oaks residents owned a home computer.

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The bulletin board posts weekly City Council agendas, minutes of meetings and listings of upcoming events at the Civic Arts Plaza--the type of information other cities would pay an online server to provide, Augustyn said.

“I have been a bigger believer in the bulletin board over the Web site,” he said. “The bulletin board is geared toward locals. If you are on the Web, you’re paying somebody.”

With the bulletin board, the city’s costs are limited to paying staff members to update posted information. The city does not have to pay an outside server, Augustyn said.

But the bulletin board is not as interactive as the Internet and does not allow computer users to click their way through a global archive of information, Internet supporters said.

“It is just so efficient,” said Behar, who designed the Ojai home page. “We tried doing this with a bulletin board system. It was much more difficult.”

Internet fans also argue that the costs associated with starting and maintaining a Web site can be minimal if governments are conservative in their spending.

“It can cost tens of thousands of dollars,” Simi Valley’s Ross said. But if a city does not worry about a fancy Web page, he said, “you are talking about $600 a year.”

Since cities already capture most of their information on computers, it is simply a matter of transferring files to an online service, Ross said.

And some government agencies have been able to strike free deals with online services.

Santa Paula, for instance, will pay nothing because the city is developing a site through a program set up by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, Dowdy said.

In Oxnard, the Police Department does not pay a dime for its Web site. Westnet, an online server, donated a space on the Internet and pays the department’s monthly Internet account.

The Web site, which posts information on community policing and anti-graffiti programs, is updated by two officers who work on their own time.

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Oxnard has the only site maintained by a law enforcement agency in the county, and was up and running long before many cities even began researching the Internet.

“The new technology hit us all of a sudden,” said Officer Tom Chronister, who has been tinkering with the page for six months. “It is kind of a neat place to get information.”

In two weeks, Oxnard will officially unveil its new Web site to the community. Officials have spent about $700 in start-up costs and will pay $45 a month for an Internet account with Westnet, Moore said. A city staff member will spend about seven hours a week updating the information.

Oxnard will be followed by Simi Valley and Moorpark, which plan to put their pages online in a few months. Ventura posted a page only days ago, though it is still “under construction” and much of the information is inaccessible for now.

“Everybody is still trying to figure out what the Internet is all about,” Oxnard’s Chronister said. “We got on it kind of early. It is becoming more and more popular.”

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Where to Find a Few Cities

Increasingly, cities across Ventura County are establishing sites on the World Wide Web to distribute information to the public. Many cities are still developing home pages. But the following agencies have posted sites on the Internet and can be accessed with the following online addresses:

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Ojai: https://www.ojai.org/

Oxnard: https://www.ci.oxnard.ca.us/

Ventura: https://www.ci.ventura.ca.us/

County of Ventura: https://www.ventura.org/

Ventura County Supt. of Schools: https://www.vcss.k12.ca.us/

Channel Islands National Park: https://nps.gov.chis/