City, county & local government employees: What are your assessments of the agnecy your work for?

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I'm hopeful there are other local gov't employees visiting this forum who will take the time to provide some insight into progress (real, perceived, professed) by their IT departments on getting local gov't systems y2k ready, compliant, ok.

Working in a department of local gov't that isn't considered mission critical, our office staff works from antiquated computers. There is no chance of being upgraded prior to y2k. No problem for me, I'll just take out my pencil and notebook. However, one thing this indicated to me is since the IT folks still have not found time to do our department's upgrades, they are apparently still working feverishly to upgrade the mission critical systems. They have less than 30 days.

On a coffee break recently, I had the opportunity to bump into our head IT man. While fairly tight lipped, he did reveal his opinion that, "no one really knows." He also indicated he expects to be working mucho overtime for the first two or three months of y2k, because he anticipates many bugs.

Does this scenario apply to your local governmet? What services might be disrupted?

-- Lisa (lisa_dawn@yahoo.com), December 02, 1999

Answers

I work for the Department of Public Welfare (food stamps, Medicare, etc.). I have been trying to get some people to do some work and keep being rebuffed with "we are too busy working on Year 2000 stuff".

-- Amy Leone (leoneamy@aol.com), December 02, 1999.

In light of Amy's post above and my own, it couldn't hurt to mention the following. Consider that, while federal agencies that provide welfare and other related services are reportedly compliant, the state, city and county governments that handle the actual distribution of benefits may not be. Housing, medicaid, food stamps, afdc, etc.

-- Lisa (lisa_dawn@yahoo.com), December 02, 1999.

I work for a Community Service Board in VA, which is our Communist- wealth, uh, I mean Commonwealth version of public mental health. We have 800+ employees and serve thousands of children and adults suffering from mild to serious psychiatric probs, mental retardation, and substance abuse. Our organization as a whole appears to demonstrate an unsurmountable lack of imagination in grasping what you guys consider to be even the most basic issues of y2k. Heaven help our clients; the staff will be using up all the inpatient beds in our psyche wards after rollover I think.

The only person at work who I suspect has any understanding is our founder and CEO, who quit 2 months ago to sail with his wife to Oregon to help out at their OceanSpray cranberry farm.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 02, 1999.


sorry--his wife's parent's farm.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 02, 1999.

Oregon & Washington, sans nuke attacks, will be OK places to be. Water, lots of it.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), December 02, 1999.


I work in a relatively non-public service agency. Some remediation has been done, but it was scattered and the software patches haven't been updated in months. Communication is very poor between different agencies in my division.

I'm expecting some serious problems processing my work, and I've forwarded my concerns to my superiors, but I don't know what actions they'll take with my opinions.

-- Deb M. (vmcclell@columbus.rr.com), December 02, 1999.


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