Committee pauses vendor changes after county's internet backup failed during outage

The Finance, IT & Tax Committee in Iroquois County agreed to postpone decisions on changing internet vendors after a recent outage revealed problems with the county's failover and vendor billing.

Committee members heard that a primary internet outage forced systems to use backup connectivity and that automatic failover did not work as expected. Adam, who oversees IT projects, said the county fell back to backup service and that "I think we're in a good position as far as the internet staying as it is," while acknowledging the failover process took longer than expected.

Staff explained the county had been removed from Conexus (also transcribed as Kexus/Koxis) invoicing lists, missed two months of invoices and paid two months plus fees to restore service; staff said they are disputing the fees with the vendor representative, identified in the meeting as April. Committee members said temporary measures such as Starlink were used in limited areas, including some 911 services, while the primary connection was unavailable.

The chair said members must better understand contract and billing details before making changes and that, because of tight budgets, she would "table any further discussion until the month of May" to allow staff to research the contract status and costs. Members discussed ETSB/911 funding responsibilities for additional redundancy, and one member warned the county must avoid placing citizens at risk.

The committee did not approve any vendor changes at the meeting; staff were asked to report back with contract and cost information in May.