Failures to post mandated documents, lack of access to the site spurs call for training
PRESIDIO COUNTY — After years of sporadic web postings of Presidio County Commissioners Court agendas, county officials seemed to have gotten that simple task down, and under current County Judge Joe Portillo, the agendas have been posted on the county’s website on time for each meeting — something that’s required by law. But with recent lapses in following the law for other postings, some elected officials are pledging to get county staff trained to make simple updates instead of relying on their state association to do the work.
When Election Day rolled around last week, a standard place to find your polling location was missing from the county’s site. Voting locations and times were posted for early voting, but not until the morning it started on October 21. State law stipulates that polling places and times be posted on a county’s website 21 days before the election.
Before the election, when The Big Bend Sentinel inquired about why the site couldn’t be updated to meet the law, county officials said an email or web form to the Texas Association of Counties (TAC) was the only way to make any changes — with a request of which documents to post and on what page — so they were on that organization’s timeline for getting the information online. The county judge’s administrative assistant, Carina Nunez, said no one at the county had login information and they weren’t allowed to by TAC. All requests for posting information — whether it’s for a financial transparency report from the county auditor, election information from the county clerk, or from the county water board for a meeting — go through the judge’s assistant, who sends the documents to TAC for posting and instructions where to put them.
County Clerk Florcita Zubia said she had submitted information on the general election to forward to TAC, but it must have gotten lost in all the hectic work of election season.
It also was a revelation for some officials that the county was even allowed to do its own postings, a process that likely will take less time than filling out a form for (TAC) to do it for them. “Any way to make our jobs easier is a win for everybody, for the county as a whole,” Zubia said. She said she would agree to having someone trained for updates in her department. “Maybe a couple of us can be trained. I think we’re all open to it. I don’t think that we were aware that we could log in and fix things ourselves.”
Presidio County Auditor Alicia Sanchez also said she would embrace having a small number of county staff trained and thinks it’s not wise to try and route everything needed on the web through one overworked county employee, who then has to ask someone at TAC to do it. She said she’s been waiting weeks for TAC to update her title on her department page to reflect that she was appointed full-time auditor.
Precinct 4 County Commissioner David Beebe said he would put an item on the court agenda around the beginning of the year asking commissioners to pass a resolution for the training.
County Judge Joe Portillo said the county doesn’t have the resources to have someone paid to do updates, but he is supportive of having staff trained, especially since he said it’s time consuming for his lone assistant to have everything come through his office.
Law also mandates posting of candidates — something Presidio County achieved by having sample ballots on the web. Also required by law is posting election results in a “practicable” amount of time after an election. Those results are still not posted.
Not being able to post at the local level also results in a variety of annoying problems that hinder communications with the public. The county’s website is a jumble of confusing information with requests for proposals mixed with tax rate postings and a public-notice page not organized by year or topic. Several pages with navigation links are blank. Officials held at least a year of Commissioners Court meetings with a Zoom link that didn’t copy properly from the PDF document of the agenda and thus left some unable — or at least confused about — how to log on to the remote meetings.
When The Sentinel inquired with the county judge’s assistant about simply posting a link that works directly on the public notices page, she responded that she would check “to see if they could do that,” with “they” meaning TAC — the first acknowledgement to The Sentinel that the county wasn’t doing its own web updates.
A spokesman for the Texas Association of Counties, Jody Seaborn, said on October 25 that he did not know how the county website systems work or the particulars on how Presidio County’s site worked. It would take a “couple of days” to get back to The Sentinel, he said. By November 1, he said his team was still “pursuing the answers” and after The Sentinel reminded TAC of its questions on November 7, there has been no reply.
A review of TAC services on its website, however, reveals some information on web assistance to counties. TAC runs a service called the County Information Resource Agency with options for counties to pay for websites of different varieties. Many rural counties use TAC’s basic website design with a content management system — an easy way for anyone to update the sites with some flexibility on design changes. It’s unclear whether Presidio County pays TAC for this, as county officials interviewed did not know, and TAC never responded to the question.
That service also posts a training manual and videos on how to update the sites. The two update tasks that would be the vast majority of those used — uploading documents like agendas and posting meetings and links to their agendas on a public notice calendar — each had one 7-minute training video. The tasks mainly involve clicking a button to upload a document or typing in calendar information and require no advanced technical skills.
Jeff Davis County Judge Curtis Evans said his county used to do the same thing — forward information to TAC to post online. But he said after finding that cumbersome, they had TAC train three people at the county to use the system. “We still have a long way to go on the site, but it’s considerably better,” he said. (Brewster County previously used TAC’s system but has gone to another vendor and a new site.)