LaSalle County IT reports two network outages, prepares website for new ADA rules
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Summary
At the Oct. 3 LaSalle County IT and Central Services meeting, IT staff reported two September network incidents tied to firewall capacity, outlined plans to address Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) website requirements taking effect after April 24, and described other ongoing IT projects including poll-book replacement and an ethics database.
At the Oct. 3 meeting of LaSalle County's IT and Central Services committee, John, an IT staff member, told the committee the county experienced two network incidents in September that slowed services and required vendor assistance to resolve.
John said, “We did have, 2 network outages this month. It was caused we had too much bandwidth going into our firewalls, and we just had to expand the ports.” He told members the county worked with Fortinet to diagnose the problem; service was restored but the county reopened the issue with Fortinet after the problem recurred the following morning.
The IT update also focused on changes to web-accessibility requirements. John said the county has “over 2,000 PDFs on our website” and that new website rules tied to the Americans with Disabilities Act will increase workload for staff charged with making documents accessible. He summarized the county’s recent vendor discussion: “Anything prior to April 24 does not have to comply with the new ADA laws. After April 24, it will have to comply with new ADA laws,” citing a recent meeting with CivicPlus, the county’s website vendor.
Kathy Owens, chair, and several committee members discussed who has authority to remove or archive older pages and documents. John described a proposed approach of having the IT chair and the board chair review a list of candidate pages for archiving; he said archived pages would remain searchable but would not be navigable from the live site.
Other IT items reported included ongoing projects for the county clerk — new poll books and voter-registration work — and a replacement of the county’s ethics database. John said the county is also awaiting a final distribution of a small IPHYPER proceeds payment that is pending return from the IRS.
The committee agreed to a process for flagging old documents for review and to pursue additional CivicPlus functionality to help with ADA compliance.
The committee moved next to an executive-session vote on personnel matters later in the meeting.