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IT Committee hears updates on GIS board appointment, outage response and court system cutovers
Summary
Eaton County technology services told the IT Committee about a staff appointment to Michigan’s GIS advisory board, a Nov. 4–5 courthouse power outage and resilience steps, delays at a Delta Township substation handoff, phone-system migrations for the health department, retirement of legacy AS400 systems and planned court case-management cutovers in early 2025.
Technology Services (Speaker 2) briefed the Eaton County IT Committee on Dec. 4 about a range of infrastructure and systems updates, including a recent power outage that tested contingency plans and a series of planned system cutovers for county courts in 2025.
Speaker 2 said John Merrick was selected for Michigan’s newly created 17-member GIS Advisory Board, a position that will allow Eaton County to raise priorities such as NextGen 911 and imagery programs at the state level. The technology report also noted the county submitted a letter of commitment to the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission for a scheduled aerial-imagery flight (part of a regular five-year rotation) planned for March–April, weather permitting.
On resilience, Speaker 2 described the Nov. 4–5 power outage at the courthouse and the coordinated response: Technology Services worked with Facilities Management, Central Dispatch, the County Clerk’s office and the sheriff’s office (including Eric Hafner) to deploy a portable generator and a communications trailer to keep critical systems running. Speaker 2 said the county must address vulnerabilities revealed by the outage—particularly the lack of cooling for data-center closets—and that mitigating those vulnerabilities should be part of future capital-improvement planning.
Speaker 2 also updated the committee on the Delta Township substation renovation. Equipment installation has begun, but network termination and power establishment in the substation room delayed server and networking installations; the contractor expects to hand off the building to the township in early January, and a temporary substation lease expires in early February 2025.
On interagency technology work, Speaker 2 said the (as spoken) "Berry and District Health Department" was migrated to a new phone system to separate its telephony from county infrastructure, improving portability for field staff and reducing county support load. Technology Services and administration also identified technology goals for the coming fiscal year, including cleaning up legacy systems, improving retention schedules and transitioning some applications to hosted environments.
Speaker 2 described progress retiring legacy applications left after former staff member Jeff Parshall’s departure, noting several systems have been migrated and that an AS400 machine was disconnected from the county network as a milestone. The county is demoing a no-cost courtroom docket-display system provided by the state of Michigan and expects to transition to that system before the new year so court staff will manage displays without additional county servers.
Finally, in coordination with court administrator Amy Etzel, Speaker 2 reported the circuit court’s case-management cutover is scheduled for Feb. 6, 2025, with the district court migration planned for June 2025. Speaker 2 said many Michigan courts have already migrated to the state multi-tenant system, and the county is not a state pilot for the platform.
