County continues tech upgrades

WALLACE — The Shoshone Board of County Commissioners are continuing their technological overhaul of the county and have approved the first in a four phase plan to get the technological infrastructure within the courthouse up to date.

This first phase includes a $24,660 software update that will dramatically improve the inner-workings of the various departments inside the courthouse, as well as firewall replacement, and a mandatory internet upgrade.

Residents who may be concerned that their taxes could take a hit shouldn’t worry, as the commissioners recognized before they approved the plan that they were going to have to remedy these issues and included the cost of Phase 1 into the county’s approved budget.

“We did give the green light to proceed with Phase 1 improvements,” BOCC chairman Mike Fitzgerald said. “The Phase 1 items were planned for and built into the county’s current budget. Implementation of the Phase 2 improvements will be evaluated later this spring.”

The proposed phased approach is set to bring the county up-to-date at the end of Phase 2, with respect to performance of essential county functions.

The later phases will address streamlining essential government functions such as seamless interdepartmental billing and record keeping.

Much like the recently redesigned and modernized website, many aspects of the county’s services were too old to manage and were beginning to simply not work.

“The county has fallen off the pace with technology. This has placed us in a position of incurring problems in completing many state required functions: court scheduling and record keeping, appraisals, tax collection, budgeting and general county administration,” Fitzgerald said. “In a nutshell, the state required software has outpaced or aged hardware to the point that without the upgrades many of the county’s duties are either no longer supported or, in some cases, can no longer be performed.”

To stress the urgency of the upgrade, Fitzgerald explained at Wednesday’s Wallace Chamber of Commerce luncheon that the obsolete software recently prevented the county from printing out W-2 tax forms and forced them to do a work around to get them.

Phase 2 will be evaluated later this spring and will require the BOCC to look at their budget again, where a projected $30,000 in server upgrades will be the main discussion.