County tech issue continues to confuse
A solution to the technology issues plaguing the online viewing option offered for meetings of the Board of Weston County Commissioners could be on the horizon after Golden West Technologies, the county's technology provider, offered to come on-site to investigate the problem.
The News Letter Journal and other viewers have experienced no sound, being kicked out of meetings or no access to the meetings as the county has begun live-streaming its meetings. The issues have been discussed on various occasions, with no resolution.
Citing a desire to address those issues, Commissioners Don Taylor, Vera Huber and Garrett Borton met with an outside tech professional who laid out several concerns that could be causing the troubles. That meeting drew the ire of the other two commissioners and raised questions of open meeting violations, and Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock responded by sending an email on March 17 to “address the misinformation and assumptions regarding my many efforts to remedy the livestream problem.”
The email and letter were sent at 2:40 p.m. from Hadlock to all five commissioners, emergency management coordinator Gilbert Nelson, Alexis Barker of the News Letter Journal and Nicholas Trandahl of the Weston County Gazette.
In the email, Hadlock stated that she has continually visited with IT professionals about the complaints, and that they have determined there was no problem.
“There is not an issue on our end; there is an issue with the individuals trying to log on. I have attached documentation that there are multiple individuals that have logged on to each Zoom/team meeting that we have had,” she said.
Hadlock did note that there were issues with a couple of the meetings because two were scheduled at the same time, but that those issues were addressed.
“I let the board know about this, and as soon as we fixed the problem, we were good to go,” she continued. “Because the board would ask, there were countless calls made to try and troubleshoot to see if there actually was a problem. Every single time I was assured there was not, and this was passed on to the board. The ‘problem’ was still there, so I upped the internet connection in the courthouse. Again, I reported to the board that there was not a problem.”
She then explained that the board asked her to purchase microphones to help with the sound issue.
“These were purchased and set up, and there were no issues with anyone hearing for the first two meetings these were used. After using these at the first meeting, the board asked me to purchase one more,” Hadlock said. “The first meeting after they were shut off (by Mr. Mills), there were multiple calls to our office, as well as the county attorney’s office, that no one could hear.”
Attached to Hadlock’s email was a letter from Spar Stormo with Golden West stating that the company did not discover any issues, and the problems were likely on the users end.
Less than two and a half hours after Hadlock sent the email declaring that “there is not an issue on our end,” however, a follow-up email was sent by Stormo that contradicted her statement.
“After having additional conversations about issues with commission meeting broadcasts, it has been determined that there could be other issues beyond what was originally understood and investigated,” Stormo said in an email sent at 5:01 p.m. the same day. “Pursuant to request, Charles (Wuestewald, a Golden West engineer) would like to come on site and investigate these other issues.”
He noted that Wuestewald would be available to visit the week of March 27 and would like to investigate the issues in the morning so he can explain the findings and possible solutions in the afternoon.
At press time, no date and time had been set for the Golden West visit to the Weston County Courthouse, and County Clerk Hadlock has not provided any further information.
