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Double Duty

A handful of states and localities are taking their digitized data to a higher level.

Every day, Jerry Huffman checks on data compiled by the animal control department to see how many animal carcasses were picked up around the city. He's not looking for any animal in particular. He doesn't even work in animal control. He's an analyst in the Baltimore Health Department. But the cat and dog data could provide a warning that a chemical, biological or radiological attack is taking place.

This deathwatch is part of the Baltimore City Biosurveillance Network, created within days of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The scrutiny doesn't stop at animal control. Huffman peruses a whole cache of statistics the city has collected--from the syndromic data compiled by hospital emergency rooms to over-the-counter pharmaceutical sales to emergency medical service calls reported by the fire department.

The data were already being amassed by city agencies for their own needs, but what Baltimore is finding is that it can use this synthesized information in other ways and for other aims to create unexpected benefits--and at a low cost. "What began as a rudimentary system to shore up Baltimore's short-term defenses against chemical or biological weapons has grown to be an invaluable asset with applications beyond terrorism prevention," says Andy Lauland, an analyst in Mayor Martin O'Malley's office.

Other states and cities also are finding that data originally collected for one purpose can play a surprisingly useful role in diverse areas of government. While states and localities are just beginning to realize that there are ways to capitalize on integrated data, the move in that direction is "substantial and important," says Jerry Mechling, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

DATA CHAINS

Baltimore started out addressing a particular need--bioterrorism-- when it began collecting the varied resources that form its biosurveillance network, but funny things started happening after that. City officials found they were able to pinpoint the flu season more accurately, better manage restaurant inspections and institute targeted asthma prevention programs.

While checking his usual data sources, Huffman gets reports of breathing problems among certain age groups during hazy, hot and humid Mid-Atlantic days. Using geographic information systems to map the asthma information, the city has been able to target which neighborhoods need visits from the city's "breathmobile," a mobile asthma clinic that can help with asthma awareness and prevention.

The tracking methods helped with rat eradication. The data let the city see that unsanitary conditions in certain locations were making people sick. And Baltimore was able to spot heavy sales in over-the- counter cough syrup or cold tablets and deduce that some "bench chemist" was making his own drugs using certain ingredients.

Last year, after Hurricane Isabel, the city used the system extensively when it needed to inspect restaurants that had been damaged by floods. The health department office mapped out all the restaurants in the area and produced a list that food inspectors could use to do their inspections and get the restaurants reopened as soon as possible.

Sometimes suspicious-looking data turn out to have a logical explanation. On a day when animal control reported an unusually high number of dead cats and dogs, officials started nosing around for the underlying reason. What they found was that the unfortunate animals had been plowed into piles of snow. Once the drifts started melting, the animals appeared from under the drifts. No sinister plot there.

MAKING THE CASE

In Washington State, all jurisdictions of a certain size must produce a six-year and a 20-year capital plan to meet the requirements of the state's growth management act. Localities collected data to create and track their plans--and send the necessary information on to the state.

But now this amassed data is being used for an entirely different purpose. It is becoming the basis of a case to press the legislature for funds to repair and build vital infrastructure. A public works trust fund, created in 1985 to respond to infrastructure decay and repair needs statewide, is collecting all the digitized information from localities, organizing it and putting it into a system. The data in that system can be used to make the dollars-and-cents case about how much money each locality needs to fund repair and replacement of bridges, roads, drinking water systems, sanitary sewer systems, storm sewer systems and solid waste and recycling facilities.

In the past, local infrastructure needs fared poorly in the highly competitive, politicized environment of the legislature. "If you can't give hard data, the money will go to those who can prove they need it," says John LaRocque, executive director of the Washington State Public Works Board, which manages the trust fund. Infrastructure has often lost out to provable needs such as "education, incarceration and medication," as LaRocque puts it.

The amalgam of infrastructure data is allowing localities to get into the game and show the legislature and local councils how much money it will take to fix crumbling roads and water systems. There are some 16,000 water systems in the state and the information from 350 of them has been put into the system so far, on a voluntary basis. Others are committed to doing the same, using operating data they already have.

While localities can use the data to fight for funding, the database itself was designed to help safeguard the funds the trust has for infrastructure improvement. That is, to guard against having the governor or legislature tap into the trust to use its money for other purposes, such as balancing the budget. "It's a lot of money," LaRocque says. "We're trying to protect it during a fiscal crisis."

The trust fund, which is a revolving loan fund, gets its money from a real estate excise tax, water and sewer taxes and a solid waste tax. It makes loans, and loan repayments go back into replenishing the fund.

But the money is not immune from a raid. Over the nearly 20-year life of the fund, the legislature has walked away with $100 million to use for other purposes. It will be harder for legislators to do that when the fund can put a list of qualified applicants for the money in lawmakers' hands, show them the fund is oversubscribed and ask them which locality's projects they'd like to de-fund. When competing with health care and education dollars, the fund can at least show highly accurate numbers on infrastructure needs and build a better case for using the money.

Wisconsin has found the same thing to be true with its budding Public Health Information Network. The network's officials are looking for the links between data in public health and justice systems, systems that can otherwise be completely insulated from each other. Integrating data on sexual assault and violence prevention, for instance, helps makes a stronger business case for funding programs to deal with those whose violent acts cross the paths of both the public health and justice departments. For both departments, the integrated data "has a bearing on how they get funding and how they account for funding," says Michael Enstrom, project manager for Wisconsin's Division of Public Health.

ACCOUNTING FOR ASSETS

Whether it was prescience or just plain good luck, the road maintenance division in Boulder County, Colorado, collected more data than it planned, and that information ended up having a fruitful second life. Back in 1995, the division didn't have accurate subdivision maps and went out to chart the center lines of the road. As long as its people were out there with global positioning equipment, the division figured it should map everything--from culverts to signs to bridges to guard rails.

Eventually, that information was imported into a geographic information system to create digital maps for every county asset. That's when a light bulb went on. "We started realizing a lot more possibilities with the data we had and things we could do with it," says John Mosher, GIS specialist in the division, who had been part of the team collecting the information. The data could be used, for instance, for a sign-maintenance program since it contained information on where the signs were located, what type they were, their age and condition. In addition, a stream and storm drainage runoff management system is in the works, and the division is exploring a sidewalk policy and pavement management program.

But the unexpected twist to the data collection came from still another use. As part of a Governmental Accounting Standards Board rule on reporting capital assets, jurisdictions have to do an inventory of all their assets and account for their value. Doing that inventory has been one of the overwhelming aspects of the GASB process. But Boulder had the good fortune--after two years of toil by the road maintenance division's team--to have most of that information already stored in its GIS system. That made it easier for the finance department to do its GASB reporting job. Using software that ties the inventory the county has collected to maintenance that has been done on roads, bridges and other assets, the county has the vital information its finance officials need to account for the cost of county assets.

In many jurisdictions, the finance and public works departments aren't used to working together or sharing the information in their databases. But fulfilling GASB requirements has given each a role in the asset accounting process--as well as an incentive to integrate their data. The public works department's job is to manage assets and assign a value to them. The finance department's job is to crunch the numbers to give the state the reporting data it wants.

Clearly, the information-rich environment of e-government is finally coming into its own, reaching a point where it's possible and logical for data to mingle. And as it does, governments are sometimes surprised by the unanticipated opportunities that crop up.

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