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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/6ab709ea30a23.image.png\")
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The County\u2019s \u201cmanagement\u201d of our internet outages represents another complete failure to govern effectively. The County\u2019s vulnerability to such an outage is well known and is something we have faced several times. In February 2023, I wrote an article on the two-month anniversary of our first outage and the County since then has not taken the steps necessary to head off the consequences of such outages.<\/p>\n
The County Council and County staff have repeatedly failed to act with the urgency that these outages demand.<\/p>\n
To make it simple:<\/p>\n
To deal with this matter and prevent such losses and threats to the community in the future, the County urgently needs to:<\/p>\n
Get an estimate of the economic value of the losses to the community from the outage. There are well-established methods of doing this.<\/p>\n
Get proposals for ensuring the provision of internet and phone services during the next outage. This has to be a serious effort, not putting up a Starlink connection at Ashley Pond.<\/p>\n
Compare the proposals to see which provides the most feasible, sustainable, cost-effective and fair approach to ensuring internet and phone services. In principle, an approach would provide a positive economic return if the losses it prevents exceed its cost. However, our losses have likely been so great that any number of approaches could provide a positive rate of return to the community.<\/p>\n
These outages go way beyond inconvenience. We take pride in being among the best-off and best-educated communities in the United States. Yet for almost four years, the County has failed to address a vulnerability that was known, repeatedly demonstrated, and entirely foreseeable. That is absolutely unacceptable governance.<\/p>\n
There also needs to be accountability. Those responsible for anticipating and preparing for these outages have had 45 months to address a known vulnerability. If, after repeated outages, they still cannot put an effective contingency plan in place, those responsible should resign.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The County\u2019s \u201cmanagement\u201d of our internet outages represents another complete failure to govern effectively. The County\u2019s vulnerability to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":861246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[1725,3237,174,74],"class_list":["post-861245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-internet","tag-columns","tag-county","tag-internet","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/861246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}