CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The fallout from the Nueces County website going offline on Wednesday continues to spread, potentially delaying crucial county decision-making.
Nueces County Commissioner Brent Chesney said someone needs to be held accountable for the domain not being renewed on time.
"It's kind of a mistake of epic proportions if you ask me," he said. "It's really caused a lot of inconvenience, a lot of downtime and a lot of loss of productivity and it's truly inexcusable."
Chesney said that the absence of foresight has presented challenges for various county departments.
"It's definitely a loss of productivity," he said.
At midnight on Wednesday, Nuecesco.com suddenly went offline, leaving employees without access to the website, internet, or emails. The county failed to meet the domain renewal deadline. This happened as they were in the process of transitioning to the new domain, Nuecescountytx.gov.
Something they had anticipated for next year. However, this process has been expedited.
"That one should have been renewed and I believe our IT department really dropped the ball on this and renewed it when they should have done that," he said. "We were going to have another year to transition to the new website now we are left in the position where we don't have that ability to do so because of the mistake made by the IT department."
Nueces County Commissioners are also feeling the impact and will have to temporarily suspend the approval of county business. Their next meeting, originally scheduled for November 8, has been postponed, according to Chesney.
"The commissioners court has to post it's meeting online and we when can't post on the website, we don't have the ability to give the public proper notice, so therefore the county judge made the decision to push the meeting back to Nov. 15."
Chesney said that when the new domain goes live, it will provide improved security for the county.
"It's not the end of the world, we'll be back up and running pretty strongly soon, but it's still something that should have been avoided, and someone has to answer as to why this happened, it's just not acceptable," he said.
Nueces County Clerk Kara Sands stated that the website's downtime will not affect next week's election. For county business, residents are advised to visit the courthouse in person.
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