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JUNE 2002 GOVERNMENT FINANCE REVIEW
ditor’s note: Each year GFOA bestows its prestigious Awards for
Excellence to recognize outstanding contributions to the practice of
government finance. This article describes the 2001 winning entry
in the Management and Service Delivery category.
Arecent study found that the number of Americans accessing
information from government Web sites increased by 70 per-
cent over the last two years to 68 million.1 As this number
continues to rise, citizens will come to expect more from these sites
than basic information on governments and their services.
Increasingly, citizen customers want to interact and transact busi-
ness online with their governments. For the City of Richardson,
Texas, where 60 percent of its 90,000 residents
are connected to the Internet, moving services
online only made sense. This article traces the
city’s steps as it evolved from the publishing
stage of e-government to the transaction
stage.2 Although the process was not without
challenges, the addition of electronic service
delivery channels such as the city’s searchable
property tax database and online payment sys-
tem has resulted in greater convenience for
customers and greater efficiencies for the city.
Toward e-Government
After deciding to provide online services, the
city’s first priority was the development of an
application that would allow citizens to view
property tax information online. The vision
for this application included several key char-
acteristics. The database would have to be
searchable by owner name, property address,
and tax ID number. The search results
obtained online would have to be available in
both text and graphic formats and include a 10-year tax history for
each property. This tax history would have to include a comparison
of property tax rates in Richardson to the rates of other area cities.
With these goals in mind, the Information Services Department
used Lotus Notes’ (the city’s mail server) database capabilities to
design and populate a property tax database applicati