County approves Light Fiber backup and defers payment until October to reduce outage risk

Bee County Commissioners approved a plan to add Light Fiber as a redundant internet path for county operations after a wide outage on June 11 left county systems offline for about eight hours, including district courts.

Craig Oliver, Bee County IT director, told the court the outage disrupted electronic court files, phones and email and said a permanent, carrier-redundant Light Fiber connection would provide automatic failover and could be load-balanced with the county's existing service. Oliver described a proposed multi-carrier long-haul arrangement and told commissioners Light Fiber had offered to defer construction costs and payment terms similar to earlier long-term agreements the county has used.

Light Fiber representatives confirmed a target operation date of Sept. 15 and said their long-haul solution pairs two independent carriers to reduce single-point failures. County officials and a district clerk stressed the urgency for temporary continuity tools for the courts and asked staff to test a hotspot solution while the fiber build proceeds. The court approved the recommendation to proceed with Light Fiber, deferred payment until Oct. 1 to allow budgeting and instructed staff to test temporary hotspot options for immediate court continuity.

The decision included direction to negotiate implementation and to return with budget and contract details; commissioners made no commitment to specific vendor contract language beyond the authorization to proceed with the recommended redundancy plan and deferred payment timeline.