McHenry County may need nearly $750,000 more than it has budgeted to upgrade and run the computer system that links the county’s justice-related departments, including the sheriff, state’s attorney, public defender, court services and circuit court clerk offices, county officials said.
The Sustain computer system is not programmed to work when the year 2000 arrives, said interim Information Services Director Tom Sullivan and one of his assistants, Sherry Bilus, during a joint meeting Tuesday of the County Board’s Finance and Management Services committees.
Old hardware, out-of-date software and insufficient memory are a few of the problems, Sullivan and Bilus said.
“This was an absolute surprise to me,” Finance Committee member John Heisler said. “We spent several hundred thousand dollars on Sustain just last year. What’s been going on? It seems to me that we had a handful of professional staff who are no longer with us who were totally blindsided by this, or who knew this stuff and were keeping it from us.”
The Sustain system is considered one of the county’s most vital systems, because it holds data on arrests, criminal cases ranging from misdemeanors to murders, criminal backgrounds of suspects, sentences and civil cases.
“We’re getting people right now who are being placed on probation for two years, and two years is when? Year 2000,” said Circuit Court Clerk Vernon W. Kays.
The problem comes as the County Board begins work on the budget for its next fiscal year. The board cut spending in its current budget by about $2.6 million from the previous year but did not achieve a balanced budget.
The committees scheduled another joint meeting for July 10, when the information-services staff will present a report on the rest of the county’s computer situation. “I’m afraid we’re uncovering some terrible situations that are going to be very costly to fix,” Heisler said.
Last week, the committees dealt with three computer contracts worth $172,000. The contracts, committee members said, had been made by former Information Services Director Carl Pohrte without the committee members’ knowledge. The contracts were for Internet support, computer engineering and other services, committee members said.
The committees recommended approval of the contracts, which the County Board must approve. The state’s attorney’s office recommended formal board approval, officials said, because Pohrte did not have authority to enter into the contracts on his own.
Pohrte resigned last month to take a new job.
Heisler said he has difficulty understanding how department managers could not know where money for their system upgrades would come from.
Kays said Pohrte had told him and other department managers that money would come from the information-services budget, or from other areas of the budget. But county officials said the money was not included in anyone’s budget.
The county needs to replace 111 old computers that would be strained to the limit running new software, Bilus said. On some 200 other machines that can handle the software, the county needs to upgrade hard drives and memory. New network servers, which link groups of personal computers, also are needed, she said.
