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Culpeper Board rescinds IT state of emergency after year‑long network recovery
Summary
Following a year of remediation after a countywide network collapse in June 2025, Culpeper County supervisors voted to rescind the IT state of emergency after hearing a technical briefing and timetable for remaining non‑emergent work.
The Culpeper County Board of Supervisors voted to rescind the county’s IT state of emergency after staff and IT leadership told the board that the county’s network has been rebuilt and critical services stabilized. Supervisor Bates made the motion to rescind the emergency, which the board approved after brief discussion.
The board’s IT director, Matt Comar, and IT staff member Jesse Martin told supervisors the outage began with a routine hardware swap on June 5, 2025, that triggered cascading failures because the county had been operating on aging, partially undocumented equipment dating back to 2015. "What took place then is ... it took down the entire network across the county, all services, public safety to animal shelter, to airport, to landfill," Martin said during the briefing. Comar said the county has since stood up a segmented, secondary network and shifted workloads to the new infrastructure, adding: "We're operating now in a secure and, nonemergency footing, for the first time since June."
Comar and Martin described months of discovery and remediation work required because the previous network had poor documentation, unmanaged endpoints, and unlicensed core components. The county used a mix of vendor support and grants; Comar said roughly $399,000 in grant funding was secured to harden public‑safety systems and that the county has not exceeded the $2.85 million the board allocated for hardware and remediation. "There is still work to be done," Comar said, "but the initial threat we worked through is handled."
Board members asked about continuing costs and long‑term planning. Supervisors were told the FY27 IT budget includes increased allocations for cybersecurity, managed services and licensing, bringing the county closer to peer localities' per‑capita IT spending. The presentation noted staff expects ongoing non‑emergent modernization and that the county is developing a multi‑year plan to sustain the network improvements.
Supervisor Bates moved to rescind the state of emergency based on the report from Comar and Martin; another supervisor seconded the motion and the board approved it. The county will continue the remaining documentation and modernization tasks under normal procurement and budgeting processes rather than emergency authority.
The board directed staff to return with more granular, multi‑year cost estimates and a post‑incident review outlining lessons learned and policy changes to prevent a recurrence.
