State’s Web Site Is Up and Running

Largely lost in the heated rhetoric about the California power crisis, a new state Web site unveiled by Gov. Gray Davis in his annual State of the State address Monday is up and running.

It groups government agencies together in one place: You can renew your vehicle registration or your nursing license, or get a sport fishing permit, a duplicate death certificate, state park campsite reservations or an appointment at the local Department of Motor Vehicles office.

Want to see live video of breeding elephant seals at a state reserve south of San Francisco? That’s there, too, at https://my.ca.gov.

For the governor of the nation’s leading cyber state, the site was a major high-tech leap. A year before, Davis had been chided for not having an e-mail address where citizens could air complaints. Now he not only has an e-mail address, graydavis@ca.gov, but also a state Web site that already appears to be a hit among citizens looking for ways to avoid dreary, time-consuming encounters with state bureaucrats.

“Yesterday we had 2,200 people make appointments at the DMV,” said Arun Baheti, the governor’s appointed director of e-government, “and that was before it was even officially launched. We also sold 100 fishing sport licenses, and more than 2,000 people looked at the endangered seals.”

The site’s 14 services are arranged in a way that often makes more sense than normal gov-speak. For that Baheti, an attorney who worked his way through UCLA law school as a computer consultant, called on the expertise of the California Research Bureau of the State Library. In case people don’t know that death certificates are administered by the Department of Health Services--death being one extreme of health--the state librarians guide them there.

Type in the word “clunker” and you get a phone number for the state’s Voluntary Accelerated Vehicle Retirement Program, which, in translation, is a program that will pay owners of eligible vehicles to retire their pollution-belching clunkers.

“What we do is translate what people are asking for into language that people normally use to talk about them,” said John Jewell, chief of state library services, who supervised the 20-person team that arranged the site.

My.ca.com has tax-related services, too, including registration to pay state taxes for domestic workers--useful for those with presidential Cabinet aspirations. According to Baheti, in its first day of operation the Web site had 70 people register as employers of domestic workers--including five who actually paid their taxes.

The site also allows residents to check the status of their tax refunds.

The state Web masters stopped short of offering more controversial services, such as assault weapon registration and hunting licenses. However, Baheti said that soon security guards--at least those who do not carry weapons--should be able to renew their licenses online. As will cosmetologists, embalmers and speech pathologists.

For services not offered directly, the site’s search engine connects consumers to other departments. The Department of Health Services link provides the form needed to apply for a duplicate death, or birth, certificate.

According to Baheti, California’s site was assembled in 110 days at a cost of $2 million. “What we are offering is a true portal along the lines of what some major private companies offer,” he said.

In at least one case, the Internet site can do things that traditional paper cannot. Filmmakers wishing to take advantage of a new law that gives state tax rebates for films produced in California can do so online. The paper forms to do the same thing have not yet been printed.