Top city needs world-class Web site
by Rodolpho Carrasco
in San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, Saturday, August 1, 1998
(Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. and a columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.)
We Pasadenans promote our city as "world-class." I agree wholeheartedly.
The list of what makes Pasadena world-class is long and includes our leading-edge universities and scientific research centers as well as our capacity for hosting national and world-level events on a regular basis - to name just a few items on that list.
In one area, however, we are in the underclass - the city of Pasadena Web site.
Change throughout the world is driven by electronic bits. My own world is conforming to e-living. This year I've planned vacations, purchased airline tickets, sold stock, daily balanced my checkbook, and ordered books over the Internet.
The internet does not eliminate the desire for leisurely strolls through Barnes and Noble, nor the security of speaking to a friendly bank teller. What the internet is at its best in, from time to time, making our lives a bit easier.
I wish the City of Pasadena web site (ci.pasadena.ca.us) would make communication with local government less difficult and more useful.
The current Pasadena city Web page is actually well put together and attractive and has a lot going for it.
The departments page there are links to more than 30 different service categories, with names and address for virtually the entire city operation.
The News page contains pertinent stories, including one that relates that Pasadena is the first city in Los Angeles County with installed Conductive Electric Vehicle Changing Station (e.g., you can now charge your electric car while you dine on Colorado Boulevard).
The Charter Reform page duly logs the machinations of the task force, consultants and City Council. Developers will appreciate the fact that the entire City General Plan is online. And the City Council home page displays the mailing addresses, phones and faxes, and email addresses of our representatives.
But for the City of Pasadena site to be considered world-class in usefulness, some immediate changes are in order.
The entire site needs to be easily searchable from the home page. This helps when you know what you need but have only a few minutes to find it.
The weather and traffic pages are light-years away from beating local morning television news and radio traffic updates.
Since Pasadena hosts so many prestigious and well-attended events, how about maps to key locations in the city?
The biggest change, however, involves applications, forms and reports. A great number of visitors to City Hall are there to procure some form of paper that must be marked and returned. Online electronic documents would save citizens a trip downtown and save city tax dollars for paper printing.
Some departments in the City have already caught this vision, utilizing the Portable Document Format (PDF) to make vital papers available to citizens in the comfort of their own homes. The genius of PDF is that complex documents can be copied to your personal computer, opened in applications like Adobe Acrobat Reader, and printed with nearly the exactly quality as the original.
Right now, developers can access the city of Pasadena General Plan. The entire Charter Reform history and minutiae is available for the downloading. But where is the city of Pasadena general employment application? Where is the application for an overnight parking permit? How about the application to be placed on the list of city-approved vendors?
A catfish pond of easily-accessible digital documents would turn the city of Pasadena web site from a good start to a tool that leaves us wondering what we ever did without it. It would dazzle us, just the Rose Parade and the World Cup dazzle viewers worldwide.
Ironically, the vision behind the City's web site is embedded within the current site. The film location library helps movie industry scouts choose locations in Pasadena suitable for filming. Hundreds of photos of gyms, backyards, theaters, tennis courts, boardrooms and other particular backdrops are neatly laid out and described.
Yes, you can download the Film Permit application in PDF format from the web page. Most fascinating of all, you may register your Pasadena property - online - as available for renting to the Film Industry.
A Web site that makes you the star - that's what I call world-class.
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