The Crawford County Commission approved a contract to move parts of the county’s 9-1-1 and communications data to a cloud environment managed through Tyler Technologies, a change county staff said will reduce downtime and centralize maintenance.

Ted Meikert, the county’s communications director, described the project as a joint effort with the city of Pittsburg. "A cloud system will allow the data to be kept off-site," Meikert said, and he cited a prior outage tied to the city’s on-site server that had affected county operations. Meikert said the one-time charge to migrate systems is $43,500 and that costs will be split among county departments and the city.

County IT staff explained technical differences between the county’s current on-premises solution and the proposed cloud service. An IT representative said the county’s package will be hosted in Amazon Web Services GovCloud, which offers redundant, geographically separated locations and managed monitoring. The staff member described the change as moving the burden of day-to-day server maintenance and monitoring to the vendor and reducing the need for ad hoc, after-hours troubleshooting by county staff.

Commissioners asked whether statutory requirements for signed paper documents would be affected. A county IT speaker noted the statutory requirement for paper records remains and that the county would retain signed originals where required; the cloud arrangement addresses data storage, redundancy and uptime rather than statutory retention of original documents.

After discussion, a commissioner moved to sign the contract with Tyler Technologies and authorize the chair to execute the agreement; the motion was seconded and carried.

The record includes several implementation details but not a full cost-allocation schedule. The transcript records the migration charge ($43,500) and general statements that costs will be shared; it does not provide department-by-department dollar splits or the vendor contract’s ongoing annual hosting fees, if any. Those details would be available in the contract and budgeting documents maintained by county staff.