A very good website developed since Landrieu became mayor provides access to many municipal services. The portal technology looks like Microsoft SharePoint but many of the internal features appear to be custom vendor systems from outfits like ESRI (known for its GIS and mapping systems).

My first stop was the crime maps published by the police department. Buried four levels deep and behind a Disclaimer page with which you must agree, you'll find a graphical map based reporting system powered by esri GIS software. Icons on the map show the locations of crimes in the past week (default). You can scroll and zoom the map to focus on a particular part of Orleans. A pull down menu lets you change the date range, filter by crime type(s). The data seems accurate but alarming. Watching a series of residential burglaries slowly approaching your neighborhood makes you want to shout out to the police. Zooming out to a national grid it looks like this system is in use by numerous municipalities across the country. Gulfport is the closest beyond Orleans. Dallas and Fort Worth use it. It would be great if we could get the ten parishes in the metro area to participate in one system like this.

Then I took a tour of the RTA site. Did you know New Orleans has a transit pass called the Jazzy Pass. You can get a day pass for a three bucks or 31 days for $55.  Then I tried the Google Maps powered transit planner to plan a bus and street car trip from a westbank address to the Camillia Grill in RiverBend. Using Google Maps with some Sanborn GeoSpatial) customization made the system easy and informative. This is the first time I've really been confident in planning a mass transit experience. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the schedules but the directions looked accurate and very usable. The Alerts section of the schedules could use some work to make it more understandable.  Once again cooperation with Jefferson and the other local parishes would make the site if not the whole RTA much more usable. One curious ommission was that even though the "Armstrong Airport" was one of the two "popular locations" listed in the destination pulldown, no trips to that location could be planned. Take a taxi.

The Assessor's have had a pretty good site for property tax records and visualization for the past years. Their new system was implemented in preparation for the 2010 combination of the seven assessors offices into a single office. The site is not directly accessible from nola.gov, at least through any link I found. Use http://nolaassessor.com/ to view the Orleans assessor's website. Jefferson Parish of course uses a different system by Bailey Link to track its property rolls. And the other eight parishes as well all use their own systems.

The Municipal Courts System is undergoing change but still operates as two systems a civil district court http://www.orleanscdc.com/ and a criminal district court http://criminalcourt.org/. That URL for the criminal district court is interesting since it does not include any locality info.

The Council site provides individual bio's, background info, calendars and pretty good "blog" style meeting summaries,  but not the degree of information on meeting agendas or pending legislation that I'd like to see.

The Inspector General's office is represented with an appropriate set of pages allowing citizens to read past reports and followups as well as logging a complaint.