Cortland to move city website to a .gov domain after small grant; migration underway

Mayor Petrosky told the Aug. 25 Cortland City Council meeting that the city has received a grant to move its website to a .gov domain and that the migration process is already underway.

The mayor said the city received a grant in the amount of $5,997 with a required 10% local match to support the domain change and related security work. She said the new official domain will be cortlandoh.gov (the transcript cited portlandoh.gov; the city name has been normalized to Cortland in this report). The mayor described .gov domains as restricted to government entities and harder to spoof, and said the change should make residents more confident that emails and web pages originating from the city are legitimate.

Why this matters: .gov domains are managed to reduce spoofing and phishing risk; for residents, a .gov address is a recognizable signal that a site belongs to an official government entity.

Next steps: the mayor said the migration is underway and did not indicate any further council action required beyond providing the local match and coordinating IT work. Staff indicated they are implementing the change and will notify residents when the new site is live.