New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington are well-prepared for Year 2000, congressional staffers say. So is Cleveland, but New Orleans is not.
The conclusion was reached Thursday as Representative Steven Horn (R-California), the congressional point man on the Y2K problem, wrapped up a three-week series of field hearings. The barnstorming tour was designed to raise Y2K awareness and survey whether state and municipal governments have prepared their computer systems for the new millennium.
Horn is chairman of the congressional subcommittee on government management, information, and technology.
"It really is uneven depending on where you are," said Matthew Ebert, a spokesman for Horn who organized the hearings.
An April survey by the National Association of State Information Resource Executives, for instance, reported that 35 states are more than 75 percent through their assessment phase and more than 27 states are 30 percent complete in their implementation efforts. Testing is underway in nearly all the states that responded to the survey.
The Year 2000 problem is an albatross around the neck of every state and local government. For starters, the cost of fixing the Y2K problem is not small potatoes. Most states have already allocated or appropriated some funds to address the issue.
In the executives association survey, states estimated costs ranging from North Dakota's US$2.1 million "for state agencies on the mainframe only" to $243 million for California. The figures don't include the university or judiciary systems, or the costs of embedded or desktop systems.
Even worse, the huge amount of resources and attention devoted to fixing Y2K have derailed or at least siphoned off time, money, and personnel that were slated for other information technology projects.
In Michigan, for example, a project designed to speed up the issuance of driver's licenses has been put on hold. And at the Pennsylvania Public School Employees' Retirees System, projects that would have provided better service for retirees have been put on the back burner.
All told, more than 50 people testified in stops that also included Dallas, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. Most were local leaders in government or business. In Cleveland, for example, Horn heard testimony from representatives of the Cleveland Clinic hospital, the First Energy Corp., and Ameritech, a telephone service provider. Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes testified in Indianapolis. In Chicago, there was testimony from the mayor's office, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Commonwealth Edison, an electric utility.
"Representative Horn is to be commended," said Linda Lambert, an assistant director with the US General Accounting Office (GAO), the congressional agency that audits federal programs. "I think they've put together a solid list of witnesses and found a series of best practices that can be applied to other communities."
At each hearing, Joel Willemssen, director of the GAO's Civil Agencies Information Systems, answered questions and advised state and local governments on where they could find tools or information for solving the problem.
The lessons learned cut both ways. Federal watchdogs were particularly impressed by officials from Lubbock, Texas, who testified of their plan to stage a Year 2000 drill that would assess their ability to handle a Y2K-precipitated disaster scenario.
"It's a learning process all across the board," Ebert said.
