Lacking an online Community
By DANA HERRA - dherra@daily-chronicle.com
Residents of DeKalb can watch a city council meeting, pay their water bill and download permit and license applications all with a few clicks through the city's Web site.
Sandwich residents can check out the municipal code, read city council minutes and agendas, and do little else.
Throughout DeKalb County, some municipalities have leaped on the online bandwagon, while others struggle to figure out how to pay for their entry into the digital age. Of the county's 14 municipalities, three – Shabbona, Waterman and Lee – have no official Web presence at all, though residents in Shabbona and Waterman have put up sites that do not carry the villages' official endorsement.
Waterman Village President Tom Ekle would like to see an official village Web site, but there's no money now to pay for its creation and ongoing maintenance, he said. Funding is also holding back Sandwich's Web site, city clerk Denise Ii said. The site is on donated server space and is maintained by volunteers, but she would like to see more information and options for residents online.
Kirkland Village Clerk Terri D'Amato said the Web site is "absolutely vital" in communicating not only with residents, but with visitors and potential new residents. Kirkland, Hinckley and Somonauk outsource their Web development to contractors.
"The first year it wasn't a budgeted expense, but this year we decided we just had to do it," Somonauk Trustee Becky Morphey said. "It's something we need to budget and it's an important thing to keep in the budget."
A 2003 report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found 97 million Americans regularly visited municipal Web sites or e-mailed government officials, a 50 percent increase from the previous year. The California-based Center for Digital Government says all municipal sites should include agendas and minutes of public meetings, budget information and contact information for government officials.
"Anything you would sit and talk about at the restaurant should be on the Web site," D'Amato said.
Malta's recently redesigned site includes meeting minutes, the village code, zoning information and downloadable permit applications – the things visitors to village hall most commonly request, village administrator Debbie Lang said, noting many people are at work during the hours the village hall is open and available.
Shabbona doesn't have a site because there's not enough staff to take care of it, Mayor Claudia Hicks said. Most of the smaller communities that manage their sites in-house assign them to already-busy clerks. While posting updates to the site takes little time, getting information from various departments can be difficult, Cortland Town Clerk Cheryl Aldis said.
Sycamore Assistant City Manager Brian Gregory said the city's site is fairly basic to keep it user-friendly. While there is a wealth of information on everything from trash collection to forms and fees to department reports, there are few interactive features.
"Overall we've got quite a bit of information and it's pretty navigable, which I think is the number one thing," he said.
A redesigned site for the county's largest municipality went live Sept. 10 with a number of new features, most notably streaming video of DeKalb City Council meetings. Visitors with high-speed Internet can watch the meetings live or video of past meetings, information and technology director Kim Williams said.
"We tried to turn the Web site into a productivity tool for everybody," Williams said.
Visitors to the site can also find detailed department reports and contracts, the budget and documents aldermen are given in their city council information packets, information assistant city manager Rudy Espiritu said is essential.
