Folks

I am going to try something new to me.

While poking aroung the GPO looking at GAO documents I noticed that the "21 cities" document wasn't on the list of GAO Y2K documents. This was in the press earlier in July and was a topic of the Y2K Senate hearings but the Document itself didn't get noticed to much. I wanted to add it to a collection of GAO documents posted earlier.

So checking up on the situation it would seem that it was scanned in (sneaky buggers). This is why it never got much attention because you can't reformat scanned images.

After the big brew hah over the Naval Report from Jim Lord it amazes me that no connection, even remote, connected the findings of the two documents. And because most folk on the internet are graphicly challanged, most didn't know of the contents and or couldn't relay the contents.

So I have taken a few gifs of the contents and posted them on my web site. Just thought that interested parties would like to know that the Naval report has a basis of truth to it.

Some may even remember in July my comments on the GAO report below. 
 

 Cities

http://www.gao.gov/corresp/AI99246R.PDF
 

Snip

 
 
 
 

-- Brian (imager@home.com), September 05, 1999

Answers

Oh it worked!

Pardon for the fuzziness of the Gifs but it is still pretty readable.

Notice that the results were confirmed by the Cities Y2K reps so this document is varified. NO SPIN possible.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), September 05, 1999.

Oh and if this isn't Sycronistic

Linkmeister posted a link to a graphic (differant from above) on the thread below.

 Assorted Water Utilities & Y2k work

Thanks Linkmeister for bringing that to our attention.

There is a version of the 21 Cities report on the Senate site.

 Senator Lugar's Statement on GAO Survey

-- Brian (imager@home.com), September 05, 1999.

Brian, I'm confused, I thought this entire document from the GAO was in pdf format. I printed the entire document a couple weeks ago, I'm looking at it right now in front of me.

It is very helpful of you to post it here as a gif though, because many people don't have Acrobat reader or can't install it.

It was picked up by someone who started a thread on this GAO report, I can't find the thread though.

-- Chris (%$^&^@pond.com), September 05, 1999.

Chris

It is a PDF format but a person can't post it on a forum "as is" because you can't copy and paste from this PDF file. While you can print it out it is alot more difficult to post it on the internet. If there is another thread about this document hopefully someone can post the link as I haven't managed to catch everything on this forum.

From the Senate Site

Senate Y2K Committee

Testimony of Randy Johnson
Chair, Hennepin County, Minnesota, Board of Commissioners
NACo Immediate Past Present
before the
U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem
July 14, 1999

Introduction

Snip
 

Most government services that people depend upon in the their daily lives are delivered not at the national or state level, but by < u>local governments ­ municipalities, school districts, and counties. Local government, in total, is not only much larger than the Federal government, but it is also even more dependent on information technology. In the United States, there are approximately 90,000 local governments - counties, municipalities, townships, school districts, and other jurisdictions. Federal government employment totals 4.2 million, while local governments employ about 12 million people. Likewise, information technology spending for the Federal government in 1997 was $28.6 billion ­ compared to state and local government estimated IT spending of $41.9 billion. Clearly, while the Federal challenge for the Year 2000 is sizeable, the local governments Year 2000 challenge is even greater.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), September 05, 1999.

Chris, is this the thread you were talking about?

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001IO0

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), September 05, 1999.

actually there were some minor comments on this a while ago, but i was also surprised too that no one had pointed this out to the media. or that the media doesn't seem to want to raise the issue. don't know why any of us are surprised--the MEDIA will NEVER tell the truth!!! NEVER--or at least until it is too late and then they will sensationalize the truth to horrify the public and have something to fill the 24 hours a day they must broadcast.

-- tt (cuddluppy@yahoo.com), September 05, 1999.

Yes Gayla, that was the thread thanks.

Brian, yes I'm aware we can't post pdf files easily here, and that's why I said you did good by posting the gif format of the table. And as tt pointed out, the spinmiesters intentionally ignored it, but we here at the forum haven't. Just one more example why this forum is the best.

-- Chris (%$^&^@pond.com), September 05, 1999.

Hello, San Antonio.

I'm a little fuzzy on your city's Contingency Plan status.

From the Survey Results: Cities' Reported Y2K Status,

Has completed contingency plans? You report "No".

Then it asks,

Testing of Contingency Plans is Completed, Ongoing, Planned, or not Planned? You report "Completed".

Therefore, a question arises: Since your Contingency Plan testing is complete, will you be able to retrofit the these results to the Completed Contingency Plan once that becomes available. (The assumption is that the Completed Contingency Plan will be available before anyone actually has to depend on it or its published results.)

Just curious, you know?

Critt

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), September 05, 1999.

Gayla

Thanks for the link and hats off to Michael Taylor for taking the time to type out a better part of the document. Good catch! Thats the kind of thing to be emailing to your hard to convert DGI friends and family.

Chris

This is actually a long standing thing I have with pdf documents and the problems they pose to alerting folks of the contents. They are just so WWW unfriendly. Why can't there be a companion html conversion posted with the PDF that has the tables and information such as above.

A very good example of this was the Senate Report from the spring. Thankfully Michael Goodfellow to the time to reformat the whole thing.

 Michael Goodfellow's Personal Page

I am very typing challanged so that is not an option for me. Now of course I have found a source for GAO and other agency documents that are on line so the referance to these sources are easier to attain.

It still baffles me why the Naval Report was more significant than this and Jim Lord should have had both on his site. It would have added alot more wieght to his point.

On the other hand as a Canadian I find the GAO information valuable as we have nothing that is comparable up here. It gives me a possible indication as to what may be happening up here in cities, although our structure is much different, the technology isn't though.

-- Brian (imager@home.com), September 05, 1999.

Brian, in my own view, I think the Pentagon/Navy report might have more dire weight with people because of the fact that it comes from the military themselves, a more direct source than with the GAO, who would get such report second hand. Also the idea that it's from the Pantagon/military somehow imparts it more respectability/veracity. I.e, if the military is taking it this seriously, we should too.

Just my opinion.

-- Chris (%$^&^@pond.com), September 05, 1999.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0017kE

[snip]

[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]

Friday July 16 1:31 AM ET

Big U.S. Cities Slow On Y2K Readiness

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many big U.S. cities -- including Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington -- are leaving themselves scant time to complete preparations for possible year 2000-related computer glitches, the audit arm of Congress said Thursday.

In addition, nine states are ``behind'' in efforts to ensure their most critical systems do not fail when the year 2000 dawns, said the head of a Senate panel monitoring the issue.

The nine -- which reported having completed work on less than 70 percent of their most important systems -- are New Hampshire, Ohio, Alabama, Louisiana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, California and Hawaii.

On a local level, only 55 percent of the smallest counties surveyed -- those with a population below 10,000 -- say they have countywide emergency plans to cope with possible 2000-related disruptions to vital services, the National Association of Counties reported.

At issue are fears that some computers may crash or scramble data by misreading 2000 as 1900, the result of old space constraints that pared the date field to two digits.

Any such glitches, known as Y2K problems, could disrupt the provision of water and waste treatment, emergency services, transportation systems, city government services and the operation of public buildings among other services.

The problem could also boggle systems that hinge on date-sensitive microchips, such as traffic signals, radio communications and 911 emergency services that rely on global positioning systems.

Dallas and Boston were alone among the 21 biggest U.S. cities to report completion of efforts to deal with the so-called Y2K problem, the General Accounting Office said. The GAO is the audit and investigative arm of Congress.

Nine cities -- New York; Houston; Philadelphia; San Diego; San Jose, California; Indianapolis, Indiana; Jacksonville, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee; and Milwaukee -- said they expected to complete preparations by Sept. 30.

The remaining 10 -- Los Angeles; Chicago; Phoenix; San Antonio, Texas; Detroit; San Francisco; Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; El Paso, Texas; and Washington -- said they expected to be ready by Dec. 31.

Joel Willemssen, head of a GAO arm that tracks information systems, voiced concern about the laggards. He made his comments in a letter released at a hearing of the Special Committee on Y2K issues.

``Completing Y2K activities in the last months of the year increases the risk that key services will not be Y2K-ready in time for 2000 because there will not be enough time to deal with unanticipated complications,'' Willemssen said.

``Given the amount of Y2K work remaining to be done in the last months of the year, contingency plans are critical to ensure that cities will continue to provide key services through the year 2000 date change,'' he added.

The Senate panel displayed a chart showing that only 43 percent of the 21 cities' key systems were said by the cities themselves to be ready as of July for the date change.

The GAO carried out the study by interviewing city officials by telephone from June 28 to July 9.

Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican who heads the special Y2K committee, said he feared that many state and local governments were ``leaving little room for testing, contingency planning and unexpected problems.''

``I hope these statistics aren't as bad as they appear,'' he said in a written statement.

``Only very efficient executive-level management and contingency planning can sustain us through the upcoming historic date change,'' added panel Vice Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), September 05, 1999.

Crit, ...Am hunkering down here in San Antonio. Have read all the stuff comin' from local official talkin' heads. Won't bore you with the sorry details and unable to provide you with proof or links. I have lived in S.A. since '85 [ah, sorry-- 1985], and all I can tell you re your question is: 1) we'd have to "step up" here to be clueless, and 2) the physiological reason we have mouths with two sides is so that we can talk out'a both of 'em... In the medical biz there's an example of an extreme procedure. It's called a retrorectal gastro-abdominal glassotomy-- that's when the patient's head is stuck so far up that a glass plate has to be inserted into the lining of the stomach outward to the abdominal wall so the person getting the procedure can see where they're going(!)

-- Dewer Dye (qwerty@!!!!.com), September 06, 1999.

So, let us look at three citites here, and see if there is any potetnial problems lurking ....

Between the three of them, Detroit, Baltimore, and San Francisco have completed NO part of any remediation in any of the following categories: Water = 0/3, Telephone = 0/3, Emergency services = 0/3, Transportation = 0/3, Public buildings = 0/3, City government = 0/3. Detroit still has to complete Power remediation, the others rely on outside utilities.

So, 0 complete in these three cities of 18 services listed.

BUT, somehow detoit has been able to "complete" Independent Verification on all of its systems, but it has also "completed" testing all of its contingency plans - not only did it finish identifying, writing, and implementing its emergency procedures, but also was even able to "test" them! (Without finishing remediation...I might add.)

San Francisco, as did 13 of these 21 cities, on the other hand, is at least honest enough to admit it's Validation & Verification (V&V) is "Ongoing" - 6 cities (including Detroit) have "Completed" V&V without finishing remedation! Of these only Boston completed remediation (scheduled to finish in July) PRIOR to "completing" V&V.

-- Robert A Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), September 07, 1999.