05/18/2002

WWLTV.com

Less than two weeks into his new job as New Orleans Chief Technology Officer, Greg Meffert has already found a way to pay for the overhaul of City Hall's computer network. He says he found the money in wasted expenses.

A prime example is in the finance department, where a fairly new computer system worth several hundred thousand dollars sits unplugged and unused.

“It's never operated functionally, ever,” said Data Processing manager Susan Whitaker. “We've had it for five years and it's never actually designed to communicate with the system the way it was designed to do.”

It was supposed to help process tax rolls by scanning information into a database. But Meffert says it's not compatible with the mainframe computers, yet the city continues to pay for it.

“When I looked at our budgets, we're actually paying about $220,000 a year for upgrades and licenses for a system that's been turned off,” said Meffert. “As far as we're able to tell, IBM are the only people that benefited from that.”

In fact, Meffert estimates, there are more than a dozen different software maintenance contracts in various city departments that are unnecessary, adding up to more than a million dollars of your tax money wasted every year.

He says he'll end the contracts as soon as possible and use the savings to fund an integrated computer system.

Enid Jackson is on the front lines of the city's tax collection system. Payments come in on a variety of forms and they're sorted, stamped, and added up by hand.

After Jackson finishes with them, someone else adds them up again. Then, they're sent to a different department to be entered into a computer and then back down to finance for further processing. Payments made in person are tallied on a cash register, a supposed temporary fix for the old system that was forcibly retired.

“A lot of times we had maintenance problems, and the last time about two years ago, we were the last,” said Whitaker. “The guy told me we were the last people in the country to have that system and they just couldn't get any parts for it any more.”

Eventually payment does make it into a database. According to Meffert, this was new technology, in 1971. Eyewitness News tried to look up a business called, "Try Me Coffee," but the system couldn't pull it up, because we left out a dash in the title.

“These “x's” show that there is some sort of lack of payment,” said Meffert. “But what we're unable to know here because of the nature of the system is that really delinquent, did they go out of business, is there a related business that these people own? Did they change their name? We don't know anything!”

Meffert suspects the city is missing overdue taxes it's not even aware of... As for what the debts they do know about. The first in a long series of letters go out next week, demanding payments.

Mayor Ray Nagin created the position of chief technology officer, to navigate the maze of outdated city operations. Meffert left his own software company to do it, finding the systems more a mess than he ever imagined.

“That part's been kind of overwhelming, but it's also making me realize you have muscles you didn't know you had, you know, you really feel that, and there's a good feeling in that,” said Meffert.

Meffert says City Hall employees have been very receptive to changes in the city's technology.

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