- November 15, 2024
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Flagler County has recovered 18 months worth of Sheriff's Office records briefly lost after the county's computer systems crashed in late October.
"All lost files have been restored and we are fully functional. That's very good news, folks," County Administrator Craig Coffey told county commissioners at a Dec. 7 County Commission workshop. Then Coffey gave commissioners the bad news: The breakdown of the county's Computer Aided Dispatch system revealed larger problems that the county will have to fix, and it won't be cheap. The county has budgeted $600,000 for IT issues. But the Sheriff's Office needs another $275,000 or so to fix its IT issues, plus about $50,000 for hardware and software. Then the county needs about $175,000 to upgrade its systems.
"We’re facing that we really need to do this, and the money’s going to come from the same place at the end of the day," Coffey said.
He predicted that the county will have IT expenses for the next four or five years. The county cut back on its IT spending during the economic downturn, Coffey said, and let itself get behind. Software licenses expired, and some of it became so outdated there was no one to provide tech support.
But as it is, said county IT Director Jarrod Shupe, the county is spending staff time dealing with problems caused by the outdated equipment and software.
"We’re spending so much labor hours, man hours right now, putting out fires to try to keep stuff together," he said. "We’re paying for extra support on equipment that isn’t really supported any longer."
Coffey gave the commission a summary of the the CAD system repair. The system went down Oct. 29, he said, and was "significantly restored" by Oct. 30. But the system was still missing some functions in NCIC and FCIC — the National Crime Information Center an the Florida Crime Information Center databases — and about 18 months worth of data. The county was not sure at the time if it could recover the data, but a data recovery company based in California was able to do that.
The problems with the CAD system were long-running, Coffey said. The county installed the $2 million New World CAD system in 2007 — but not correctly, New World technicians told the county in 2014.
"So we bought this expensive system, no one really knew how to really use it functionally or the way it should work, so we’ve always had some issues," Coffey said. The Sheriff's Office managed the system until 2014, when the county took over.
The system was running on two servers. It should have been running on 12. "So the way the New World person talked about it — I think he called our system 'spaghetti,'" Coffey said. "It was like thrown against the wall. ... It wasn’t going in the directions it needed to be going."
The county has started fixing the problems, migrating to the most up-to-date platform and the most current CAD software. Much of the $600,000 the county has budgeted for IT issues will have to be used to train technicians who can repair it. The CAD system upgrade and associated staff training should take about six to nine months, Coffey said.
But then there are other problems with the Sheriff's Office computer and IT systems. The Sheriff's Office's email servers crashed before the CAD crash.
"His stuff is just too old and too cruddy, for lack of a better term, and it’s not the sheriff’s fault," Coffey said. "Some of his systems over there were on borrowed time." It would cost about $275,000, not yet budgeted for, to fix the Sheriff's Office IT infrastructure, plus about $50,000 in new hardware and software, and would take about six to 12 months.
The county also has about $175,000 in unforseen IT expenses for this budget cycle.
"If you’re fixing up a jalopy and the jalopy keeps breaking down, you might have to replace the jalopy," Coffey said. "Sometimes it’s not the mechanic’s fault. And that’s kind of where we’re at."
Commissioner Nate McLaughlin didn't want to see a repeat of the IT debacle. Better to pay the money needed to keep things up-to-date, he said.
"When we’re talking about IT, you come to a point where you either keep up or catch up; it’ll cost the same," he said. "It’s the same money and yet you don’t have the problems if you keep up. ... It’s important to keep up once we get caught up. Because it just — as you see — it gets beghind you so quickly, and especially in the computer world. It’s just the world we live in."
