The Internet for Regions' Profit:
Bay Area as U.S. Beta Site

(Neal Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about local government issues. His columns do not reflect the opinions of County News or NACo.)

Just utter the word Internet and images of distant Web sites and disembodied cyberspace spring to mind.

But regions serious about competing in the new global economy know better. And none more so than Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, birthplace of chip technology, home to half the world's computer system architects.

"Geography is still vital. Most of our interactions are with people in a 20- to 50-mile radius," says Seth Fearey of Collaborative Economics here. He has been a key figure in the five year-old "Smart Valley," an electronic community initiative to apply advanced information technology to solve regional problems.

Regional electronic links are becoming key to business, government, social success, Fearey told a group of European fellows, curious about American technology, at a recent German Marshall Fund of the U.S. meeting in Oakland.

Cities, Fearey noted, are too small to suffice as full-purpose electronic platforms. States are too large, too distant from the focus of local needs. Regions, or counties, are the right size.

Clearly, when a region is wired and connected, there's major opportunity for its businesses to showcase their supplies and services, locally as well as globally, through lively, interactive Internet sites.

Governments, for their part, can service citizens with everything from emergency information to town council meeting agendas to forms that let people apply quickly, without fuss, for anything from a home remodeling permit to a marriage license.

The Smart Valley effort - born, as Fearey notes, at a time of a California recession, "out of fear we'd get eaten alive by Japan or Fortress Europe" - has produced a series of ways to foster business-community-government collaboration.

The system was modeled in part on Singapore's "Intelligent Island" use of inventive computer technology. It has included efforts to get free Internet access in schools and libraries - enabling, among other things, thousands of citizen job searches.

Smart Valley's telecommuting project aimed at getting cars off the road in one of America's most traffic-congested areas. It promoted employer interest by showing a 10 percent productivity improvement among telecommuters who found they gained more control of their lives and spent less time driving.

Last year, in a project called "Connect 96," Smart Valley staged the first-ever conference of the world's pioneering electronic communities. It showcased 40 regional models from North America, Europe and Asia.

In 1994, Palo Alto was the only Bay Area local government with its own Web site. The site's been a real boon for the city, says former Mayor Liz Kniss, because citizens can access city hall at any hour of the day or night, to get information, or leave messages.

Then ABAG - the Association of Bay Area Governments - set up an Internet server and offered its local governments inexpensive hosting services. Today 69 cities, eight counties, 25 special districts and more than 90 school districts and libraries are on ABAG's system. It receives 5,000 to 7,000 "hits" a day.

The model is obvious: Bureaucracy recedes, city hall gains business-like responsiveness and government starts to regain some of the citizen respect lost over the last generation.

ABAG's site provides all manner of useful data - Bay Area trail maps, Census data, gun control measures, Bay Area Transit schedules and fares, welfare reform rules and analysis. It even shows detailed regional and localized earthquake hazard maps - a feature that's angered some realtors but is wildly successful with common citizens.

On top of all this, Bay Area schools are likely America's best "wired" and computer-equipped.

The Bay Area's hardly alone, of course, in providing a set of imaginative and state-of-the-art Internet services. Where it stands out as a region intent on using technology to stay ahead economically - and civically, is in the totality of its efforts.

The Bay Area's become a kind of beta site for the 21st century Information Highway. Other regions, across the United States and around the globe, are likely to be taking a page from its book.

(c) 1997, Washington Post Writers Group