Some allow people to pay taxes online. Others allow people to view ballots, restaurant inspections, pictures of wanted suspects and a list of sex offenders. A few are creating an e-marketplace where government suppliers can bid for contracts. Some even are weighing the idea of online voting. A big question, though, is how governments can pay for all these e-services.
Most people are still wary of paying extra surcharges for the convenience of doing business online.
What's more, a lot of counties find it difficult to fund Web services and, therefore, take money away from schools, prisons and health care. We are pretty cautious about that. It was not always that way, though. Many of the county's mainframes and personal computers were more than two decades old. When the PCs broke down, as they did frequently, repairs would take weeks, and county employees took to pen and paper instead.