This commentary is by Stephen Whitaker, a resident of Montpelier.
Regarding ”state websites back online after 19-hour outage”: A guardrail or backhoe fiber-cut incident in Middlesex happened in 2018, taking down all of the state government telephones and websites in Vermont. Another under-bridge conduit washout in Chittenden County in 2019 took out connectivity to 23 cell towers and some state services.
Why was this allowed to happen again?
How was a state of Vermont web-hosting contract for essential services even awarded to a data center lacking redundant, diverse routed circuits? Where are the Vermont Agency of Digital Services standards (and enforcement) which require analysis and confirmation that such redundancy is in place? And routinely tested?
Now you can begin to understand the complexity of planning for each circuit and service relied upon for public safety communications, essential connectivity from each and every landline or cellular telephone, to the phone switches, the public safety answering points, to dispatch consoles, to radio towers, to emergency response vehicles or portable radios. They all also need to remain active despite frequent and extended power outages, with mountaintop generators requiring refueling, even in the harshest snow and ice storm conditions.
Just don’t be tempted to join the simpleminded chorus of officials, including the governor’s own attorney, insisting that “it’s working now,” as that would be nothing less than self-delusion at the risk of all Vermonters’ health and safety. To insist that these responsibilities be shifted now to the E911 Board, which has adamantly denied any responsibility for addressing these (and cellular dead zones) vulnerabilities for years now, as is being proposed in the Senate GovOps bill S.139 and budget language, is likewise delusional folly and negligence.
We are now backed against the wall for some unknown amount over $100 million due to the chronically failed planning duties assigned in statute to the Public Service Department, the Agency of Digital Services, the Public Utility Commission, the Department of Public Safety and the legislative committees, whose ineffective oversight has allowed the deficient planning and even financial fraud to continue unchecked, confirming the commissioner of public service again and again while denying the reality of the risks and ignoring the violations of law.
One senior Joint Technology Oversight Committee senator has the gall to tell me I’m reading the statute too literally!
The governor’s faux-frugality is simply shifting increasing liabilities forward to beyond his term in office, by ignoring the failed planning and the absolutely essential and urgent cost-effectiveness of integrating the planning for public safety communications, state highway cellular service, priority and preemption-enabled LTE broadband for first responders and fiber-broadband initiative now being squandered by the Broadband Board.
Govern, will ya?
