Upgrades to county website coming soon

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Pending the approval of the county council, Putnam County's woefully out-of-date website will be updated in the coming months.

The Putnam County Commissioners agreed in principle on Monday to a $3,500 contract with Jon Tesmer to update the county site at co.putnam.in.us.

The contract amount is based on a $100 fee per office currently listed on the county website.

County Attorney Jim Ensley said he has spoken with Tesmer, who has agreed to set up as many as 35 different portals, one for each office, and to train someone in each department on how to keep the site up to date.

In addition to the setup fees and the training time, Tesmer will provide four more hours of training time to the county.

Any further training or maintenance on the pages of individual offices will be paid from that office's budget.

County Commissioners David Berry, Don Walton and Max Watts voted unanimously to move forward with the plan as presented by Ensley.

However, the $3,500 expenditure will have to be approved by the county council at its Tuesday, March 18 meeting. The appropriation must be advertised before approval, so it could not be on the February council agenda.

As currently constructed, the website has some badly outdated information, including listing some offices as still being at the Putnam County Courthouse Annex, which closed in November 2011.

Ensley indicated that the website issues have reached critical mass.

"We're at a point with the website that if we're not going to do something with it, we need to pull the plug," Ensley said.

In other business:

* The commissioners reappointed Dr. John Scamahorn to the Putnam County Health Board.

* Putnam County's Indiana Bicentennial Committee was granted permission to use the courthouse for the bicentennial celebration on Sunday, Dec. 11, 2016.

* Highway Supervisor Mike Ricketts said the department is doing well on road salt, having been as frugal with it as possible. Some new loads of salt have also been delivered recently.

* The commissioners approved local match funds of $4,170.27 for the Emergency Management Agency. The matching funds keep the county eligible for $12,480 in federal money from the Department of Homeland Security.

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