New Jersey: The Online State
Garden State Finds a New Way to Do Business By Richard McCaffery Staff Writer New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman looks over the Web site that carried her state of the state speech in January. The state government has made a commitment to use technology to transform the way it conducts business. Ask Ne
Garden State Finds a New Way to Do Business By Richard McCaffery
Companies submit permit applications to operate equipment ranging from boilers to incinerators. Simply filing an application electronically cuts off 15 days from the evaluation process, Ebeid said. By winter 1999, all of the department's divisions - water, air, solid waste and hazardous materials - will be online and integrated as part of one system. Ebeid expects the system to cut in half the time it takes for companies to obtain all their permits, a process that now can take two years. By the end of 2000, New Jersey aims to have consolidated the number of environmental permits its issues from as many as 11 down to as few as one. "Our goal is simple," Ebeid said. "We want companies to stay in New Jersey, and we want new companies to come to New Jersey. We won't relax our laws because we can't do that, but we will make it easier for companies to go through the environmental process." To understand how hard it was to navigate the permitting process for air quality standards, imagine a company that wants to build and operate a utility boiler, Ebeid said. There are more than 30,000 state and federal requirements that are part of New Jersey's air quality permitting process. Not all of the requirement apply in every case, but figuring out which ones do is essential if a company wants to know which standards it will have to obey. "It was impossible before," Ebeid said. Companies never knew if they could comply with the requirements until after the permit was issued, which led to stacks of permit appeals, he said. Industry officials agreed there was too much guesswork in the process. "You would go through a new person [every time], who would make a decision on their own about what should go into a permit," said Hank Van Handle, regulatory and engineering services manager at Tosco Refining Co.'s Bayway refinery. Tosco, an oil refinery in Linden, N.J., also has facilities in California, Washington and Pennsylvania. Since the standards were so complicated, even the same pieces of equipment would often be issued widely different permits. "Now there is a presumptive set of conditions," Van Handle said. "It's much more certain upfront. ... It was a good, honest effort on the part of the department to make things flow more smoothly." For AMS' environmental systems group, business has picked up since the early 1990s as states moved to implement amendments to the Clean Air Act, Labovich said. "What it forced a number of states to do was rethink their permitting process," he said. "We saw technology as a way of helping them comply." Computer technology is a natural fit for processing environmental data because there's so much of it, Labovich said. For example, New Jersey's air quality division receives about 5,000 permit requests a year, according to Ebeid. The solid waste, water and hazardous materials divisions have to process annually thousands of compliance reports. Labovich expects AMS' environmental group, which has increased its revenues 35 percent over the last three years, to earn between $15 million and $17 million in 1998. "It's a very healthy niche," he said. The system AMS designed for New Jersey was featured at a 32-state technology exposition at the National Governors' Association's annual meeting in Milwaukee Aug. 1-4. Overall, AMS had revenues of $872 million in 1997. It has more than doubled revenues over the past four years and increased its staff from 3,500 to 8,000. A publicly traded company, AMS is one of the 20 largest consulting firms in the world. Despite improvements, changes at New Jersey's environmental department haven't been easy, Ebeid said. Since 1994, the department has trimmed 600 employees from its work force as part of a massive restructuring. The biggest hurdle? "It's leading the employees and managers to recognize there's a new way of doing business," Ebeid said. "That continues to be a challenge."
New Jersey: The Online StateThe state of New Jersey issued the following vision statement regarding its information technology goals for its citizens. It aims to provide consumers with the highest level of
|