Pontiac Summit

Posts Tagged ‘Oakland County’

Oakland County is using cyberspace methods to get more real people voting in the next election cycle.

Its latest innovation is to send out an email reminder to voters two weeks before elections and then again on election days. The reminder will also include a bevy of other information voters can use to make the process easier.

“It’s kind of like an electronic post-it note,” says Ruth Johnson, Oakland County Clerk/Register of Deeds.

The emails will be sent out before all local, school, state, and federal elections and will link to the clerk’s website. The site will feature a list of candidates and ballot proposals, campaign finance reports, polling locations, and instructional videos for using voting machines.

It will also feature a new election reporting system that reveals results in real time. Also included will be information on voter registration and on how to become a poll worker, and a link to the state’s Voter Information Center.

“This is just one more tool in the tool box,” Johnson says.

For information on these new systems, click here.

The Center for Digital Government recently recognized two of Oakland County’s eGovernment programs for its 2009 Digital Government Achievement Awards – its Video Center and the Blogin’ Café.

The Video Center is located on the county’s website and the Blogin’ Cafe was featured at last year’s Arts, Beats & Eats festival in downtown Pontiac. The awards recognized these programs as first-rate ideas and collaborations on digital solutions that benefit citizens.

Oakland County sees this as a sort of electronic evolution of government that provides more with less. The idea is that the old ways of deeply rooted government processes where certain people look at certain sheets of paper decade after decade can be turned on its head thanks to the new economy.

Now it can do such work with fewer human resources while still dispensing more information to more people. This new automation provides more information in a convenient way.

“Many times they’ll go to the web first before they pick up the phone or get in the car,” says Phil Bertolini, deputy county executive and CIO for Oakland County. “We believe the needs of the consumer are changing.”

They also see this as a way of effectively cutting costs without reducing services in a time of ever-present budget shortfalls. It’s a line of new, innovative thinking officials are aggressively pursuing and why Oakland County was recently rated as the No. 1 digital county in America.

During these tough economic times, many companies and organizations bring out the long-term statistics from the past several years to put themselves in a better light. Oakland County can fall back on both the long- and short-term statistics.

The county released a report that shows not only has it taken in about $2.4 billion worth of investment over the last five years, it did well in June, with $748 million in investment.

Most of that comes from General Motors’ plans for a $650 million Orion Township plant, which will build smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. However, that leaves about another $100 million that the county was able to attract in the midst of one of the toughest economies in generations.

Oakland County has had more than $2.4 billion worth of business investment in the past five years, giving residents a reason to be optimistic about its future during the most difficult economic challenge in its history, County Executive L. Brooks Patterson said recently.

“We had our best month ever during one of the worst times ever,” Oakland County Executive L Brooks Patterson said in a press release. “We’ve withstood all of the body blows and we’re still standing.”

More of the $2.4 billion came from emerging sectors based in the new economy ($1.3 billion), compared to traditional business sectors, like automotive manufacturing. Oakland County created its Emerging Sectors program five years ago to help diversify its economy and make up for lost manufacturing jobs.