VENTURA COUNTY ROUNDUP : Thousand Oaks : 9/9/99 No Problem, City Officials Say

Depending on whom you talk to, this Thursday can mean different things.

To a teen it might signify the date of the MTV Video Music Awards. To working adults, it’s nearly the end of the week.

But for computer experts, Thursday is also 9/9/99 and another potential computer glitch months before the globally dreaded Jan. 1, 2000.

In the past, computer programmers often used 9/9/99 to represent the end of a file. Thus, a program could conceivably stop working if a computer found that code inside the application.

But according to Thousand Oaks officials, local residents have no reason to worry. Nothing unexpected will occur in Thousand Oaks because the city doesn’t have any programs that would use such a code, according to John Augustyn, the city’s information systems manager.

“It will be a pretty uneventful day,” Augustyn predicted.

And the way things are shaping up, celebrating New Year’s Eve should be the only thing on local residents’ minds come year’s end. Although there has been widespread concern about the start of 2000 shutting down computer systems around the world, Thousand Oaks is more than 90% Y2K compliant and has been for about six months, said Grahame Watts, the city’s emergency preparedness coordinator.

“Preparing for Y2K problems is like preparing for a scheduled earthquake that never shows up,” Watts said.

The city’s biggest accomplishment, according to Watts, was upgrading its computer systems during the past three years. The city also established a Y2K compliance committee to coordinate departmental efforts.

“The biggest mountain is people’s perception of what they think might happen as opposed to what realistically could happen,” Watts said. “All of our critical systems have been reviewed, verified and tested.”