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Highlands Today

Information To Be More Accessible With New Software

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By Jim  Konkoly | Highlands Today

Published: December 11, 2007

SEBRING — Public records and public meetings in Highlands County will soon be more open and more accessible than ever before.

With an Internet connection and a few strokes on a keyboard, people can have instant access to virtually every piece of information the county has, plus verbatim accounts of county commission meetings.

In about a month, new computer software acquired by the Highlands County Clerk of Courts Office – which handles both county government business and court records – will make more information available more quickly through the Internet.

By going to the clerk's Web site, www.hcclerk.org, people will find verbatim accounts of every word spoken by every person during every minute of every Highlands County Board of Commissioners meeting.

Those verbatim accounts, in fact, can be viewed on a computer in three ways: a video clip of the section of a meeting that you're interested in, a separate audio-only clip of that meeting segment, and/or an official transcript of that portion of the meeting's minutes.

Other uses for the clerk's upgraded Web site range from paying a traffic ticket online with a credit card, to checking out your neighbors, to see if they have a criminal record and, if so, what they have been charged or convicted of, and whether they're currently in, or have been bonded out of county jail.

This new system should be open for the public on the clerk's Web site within 30 days, according to Debra Williams, director of recording, micrographics and board records in the office of L.E. "Luke" Brooker, now in his fourth four-year term as county clerk.

Williams was one of three administrators from Brooker's office who explained the new, computerized access to county government information via the Internet at Monday morning's meeting of the Highlands County Homeowners Association.

Asked for a date when the new system will up and running, Bob Jamison of the clerk's office answered, "We're working the bugs out now."

Assuming there are no unexpected problems, he said, the new information-access system should be fully implemented by the end of the year or in early January.

Jamison, the clerk's senior director of business services, gave a demonstration of how the system works, with the clerk's Web site projected onto a large screen at the homeowners' meeting.

With Tony Qualls, the clerk's information-technology, network operations manager, operating the www.hcclerk.org Web site, Jamison and Williams showed sample information searches.

In one such demonstration, they pulled up a video clip of a portion of a recent county commissioners meeting which showed Jim Polatty, the county's development director, discussing a planning issue.

In addition to that video clip, Jamison, Qualls and Williams also pulled up the audio clip of that meeting segment and the official minutes , recording Polatty's words and the discussion of that planning issue by other people.

Some county commissioners meetings run from one to three hours, but many are long, up to six, seven or more hours. To quickly wade through all of the discussions, presentations and actions in those meetings, people can use bookmarks for various topics, Williams said.

Jamison described the new system of showing virtually every county document and record, plus the video, audio and written records of public meetings, "an enhanced service that we can provide to you."

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