FLORENCE, S.C. (WBTW)-If you live in Florence county you can breathe a sigh of relief. Florence county council recently approved reallocating three million dollars to help fund a nearly 7-million dollar project to completely replace the county’s information technology system. Prior to the reallocation plan, council thought raising property taxes would be the avenue to pay for it. Now the money is coming from the debt service fund, the road maintenance fund and the economical capital development fund.
News13’s Jana Jones spoke with one county councilman who says this multi-million dollar project is long overdue.
From outages, website glitches and county email failure the county says something major happens about once a month. County Councilman Jason Springs says it’s a pricey project now but could be more costly later if something isn’t done.
“It would be catastrophic if someone were to breech the security of the county’s I.T. system.”
County Councilman Jason Springs says he knows the risks of the county’s current I.T. system which is why attempting to fix the current one in place is no longer an option.
“When you’ve got a system like we’ve got, it’s kind of like taking a ten year old car and putting a new paint job on it and new tires on it and expecting it to last another ten years. Without going in and changing the engine and the drive chain in the car, you’ve still got an old car that’s just not reliable.”
Springs says they’ve been trying to fix the aging system with “band aids” for years but with it’s current state, they wanted to make the best use of tax payers dollars.
“There was only about a fifteen percent difference over the course of the next three years of replacing the entire system or continuing to upgrade it piece by piece.”
The new I.T. system will have two live centers so if one were to go down, the other would remain running seamlessly.
“So if one system were to go down, the taxpayers wouldn’t see any issues with it and they could continue to do business like they would on any other day.”
Although the county says the system crashes have been inconvenient, their main concerns were security breeches.
“Just our property tax records. If you could imagine if someone went in and altered the value of the property taxes in the county how that could affect the revenue incomes for the county and the burden that it could inadvertently put on our citizens.”
The county’s I.T. department has consulted with five global organizations of I.T. experts and they’ve all approved this new system. Council says they’ve already started working on putting in the two new centers and they hope the project will be completely in place within the year.
