PTI announces Technology Leadership Awards

For fostering the use of technology in local government, technology managers from San Carlos, Calif., Des Monies, Iowa, and Sarasota County, Fla., will meet in April to receive Public Technology, Inc.'s 1999 Technology Leadership Award.

The award winners, San Carlos city manager Michael Garvey, Des Moines city manager Eric Anderson and Sarasota County's administrator James Ley will be honored at PTI's (pti.org) annual conference in Denver.

This is the first year that three winners have been selected instead of one in a move to better illustrate the broad range of PTI's membership. San Carlos represents the small districts, Des Moines (www.ci.des-moines.ia.us) medium-size jurisdictions, and Sarasota County's nearly 300,000 residents qualified it for the large-size category.

"What technology does is it makes people more productive, but it also allows us to make fundamentally better decisions about the service-delivery system, fundamentally make better policies and be more connected with reality," Anderson said.

San Carlos' (www.ci.san-carlos.ca.us) Garvey echoed Anderson's thoughts. "Technology afforded us the ability to change all the ground rules and become far more effective, especially if you have regional cooperation," he said.

Sarasota County's (www.co.sarasota.fl.us) Ley also weighed in on the overall mission of technology. "Technology provides the means to empower people through the democratization of information and the connection of workflows," he said. "It has to be a fundamental linking piece."