The Solano County Property Tax System, or SCIPS is at least 10 years old (todo: cite)?.

Per the Position Allocation Report (http://www.solanocounty.com/civica/filebank/blobdload.asp?BlobID=2849) (as of August 6, 2010), the Department of Information Technology's (DOIT) division Solano County Integrated Property System (SCIPS). 1879 DOIT-SCIPS Business Systems Analyst 1.00 Programmer Analyst 2.00 Systems & Programming Manager 1.00 Systems Analyst 3.00 Systems Analyst (Senior) 2.00 DIVISION TOTAL 9.00 Nine full-time staff members are working to develop and maintain a system that only Solano County uses. There are 58 Counties (todo: link) in California, and each. The system is written in?
Is the system open source?
9 Full Time Equivalents (FTE's) 2000 Working hours per year (assuming 40 hours per week * 50 weeks + 2 weeks vacation) - most public employees get 13 holidays, 10+ sick days, an 10+vacation days. 18000 Working hours per year for the entire staff 15 years 270,000 Working hours for SCIPS - URL $30,000,000 + for SCIPS. Not good. What other vendors are on the market? (What do all Counties use?)

What are other agencies doing? How about an experiment in a collaborative software building process. It may be difficult to embrace the idea that it is the public's role to develop software, yet this is what government currently does anyhow, with homegrown systems.