LaSalle County IT committee backs exploring buried fiber to nursing home and highway; staff to include costs in next budget

LaSalle County’s IT staff proposed extending buried fiber to the county nursing home and the nearby highway complex during the May 1 IT & Central Services Committee meeting, and committee members asked that the project be costed and placed in the next fiscal budget.

John Hague (IT) said the county has relied on air-fiber and point-to-point antennas for redundancy but that windstorms and antenna fragility leave the nursing home and highway vulnerable to outages. He described buried fiber as a more resilient option: "It closes our network and it gives us a solid connection, a buried fiber out there … unless somebody hits it with a backhoe, the fiber generally does not go down," Hague said.

Hague said previous estimates placed the project in the low hundreds of thousands; the meeting transcript records the estimate as "between $3.03 and 400,000," which Hague characterized in discussion as a ballpark for budgeting and logistics rather than a finalized quote. He told the committee he would run numbers with vendors (Stratus and others), gather more precise quotes, and return with figures so finance could consider the expense in next year’s budget cycle.

Committee members said the connection would also benefit the highway department’s operations and public-safety functions. One member said reliable connectivity is important for road-clearing and emergency response. Multiple members agreed the project should be planned into the next fiscal year rather than pursued mid‑year without budget authority.

The recorder shows no formal motion to appropriate funds at this meeting; committee members agreed to have IT develop cost estimates and to forward those figures to finance for budget consideration.