Iowa State officials are confident the university is prepared for any potential Y2K problems, and Iowa’s other two regent universities feel the same way.

University of Iowa and University of Northern Iowa both have been preparing for the year 2000 for a few years.

Dave Dobbins, associate director for Information Technology Services at the U of I, said the university has done extensive planning for the new year.

“It goes back two, three, four years. We’ve invested about 45 hours of programming time,” Dobbins said. “We replaced the payroll system and a few others. … We’ve made a campus contingency planning group. … We’ve formed a group called Team 2000.”

Dobbins said there have been three open forums held at U of I, hosted by Information Technology Services, the Department of Public Safety and University Hospitals and Clinics, for anyone with questions or concerns about Y2K.

Chuck Green, director of public safety at U of I, was a part of the Y2K planning process and expects no problems with security.

“We would say we’re ready,” Dobbins said. “We can’t guarantee that we won’t have any problems, but we feel very prepared.”

University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics also have been preparing for the year 2000, developing a contingency plan separate from that of U of I.

“We’ve been working on this project almost nonstop for the past three years,” said Jim Wagner, director of hospital information systems. “We’ve spent about $2.25 million on the efforts so far just for the changes that needed to be made on our patient record system.”

Wagner said the hospitals are self-sufficient, with a motor generator and a diesel generator to allow them to continue to operate in the event of a power loss.

“In addition to our regular telephone system, we have a separate internal emergency telephone system. That phone runs off its own power source,” he said. “We have our own water supply. … We have special provisions for all the medical equipment.”

While many organizations will be running on skeleton crews on New Year’s Eve, University Hospitals will be doubling the number of staff on duty, Wagner said.

“We’re going to be staffed and ready to go just in case there are any problems, but we’ve done very thorough testing in our area,” he said. “There’s typically about 200 doctors and nurses, and on New Year’s Eve, we’ll have about 400 people here.”

Garry Bozylinsky, associate vice president for Information Technology Services at University of Northern Iowa, is the Y2K coordinator there.

“We spent several years in assessing our software systems and the hardware across the campus — computer hardware as well as physical hardware — to figure out what the Y2K-related issues would be and spent the last three to five years figuring out what was really critical,” he said.

Bozylinsky said UNI has done extensive testing of all their systems to prepare for Y2K.

“We’ve tested all of our software changes,” he said. “We even sent our telephone manager out to New Jersey to test our telephone service. We’re confident that our phone system will work.”

Like ISU, UNI has its own power supply independent of the city.

“We can power up a large part of the campus,” Bozylinsky said. “In addition, the city of Cedar Falls can generate its own power, too. A number of systems have their own backup generators.”

Like at ISU, there will be a Y2K Command Center set up at UNI on New Year’s Eve.

“We’re working with the campus police in our Command Center,” he said.

Bozylinsky said the student population on campus should be low on New Year’s.

“We have about a hundred students who will be on campus,” he said. “We’ll have all the staff available if there should be any problem.”

They will monitor the rest of the world from the Command Center to be prepared if problems should arise elsewhere.

“We have staff monitoring what’s happening in Asia, Europe and the East Coast to see what’s happening there,” he said.

Bozylinsky said he feels confident that UNI is ready for the new year.

“We’ve done a lot of contingency planning, and we feel that we are very prepared, but it would be foolish of us not to have any plans in place,” he said. “We really expect it to be a quiet, uneventful evening.”

The contingency plans for both universities are posted on their Web sites at www.uiowa.edu and www.uni.edu.