COVID recovery addresses needs

County Commissioners approved the use of COVID-19 Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to pay for courthouse needs and a Bandera Fire & Rescue loan payoff, as requested by County Auditor Darryl Sadler at their regular meeting on Sept. 22.

$4996.15 was allocated to replace five outdated computers currently used in various courthouse areas, such as judge’s chambers, court sessions and the clerk’s office.

“We didn’t budget for these because we were looking more at people’s personal computers,” said Sadler. “So, we’d like to use the COVID funds to cover the cost of these five computers, which is about $1,000 each. Bandera County Judge Richard Evans recognized the need for funds. “The big problem was the computer that is used to create judgements. It didn’t work. We can’t have that,” he stated. $42,075 was allocated for county software and service fees.

According to Sadler, when the county servers were exposed to the big cyber intrusion, a forensic team performed an investigation, after which a law firm recommended enhancing county security and continued monitoring of endpoint responses.

Software had already been installed as part of the county’s insurance claim for the cyber intrusion. Thus, a one-time payment of $11,250 for holding onto and owning that software was the cost. The monthly service fee is about $2,570, which protects each individual user on an automatic system that monitors intrusions and quarantines them.

“This will provide us less chance of a data breach. If we approve this, it will be for 12 months; then we can start budgeting for this in the future,” said Sadler.

$14,038.85 was allocated for Bandera Fire & Rescue to payoff their Rescue 1 truck.

Per Sadler, that departmet had already used $10,000 of the COVID funds paid to them earlier this year towards that truck.

Now, with an interest rate of 5.5 percent, “They just want it to be done with,” said Sadler.