By Meladi Brewer

DailyAdvocate.com

GREENVILLE — Commissioners are working to speed up connections, ensure public safety, and working to ensure healthy aging in Darke County. Commissioners Matt Aultman and Marshall Combs were present.

The Darke County Commissioners signed a contract with Shared Harvest for a sum of not to exceed $43,309 to provide food assistance in accordance to the Healthy Aging Grant Agreement.

“We had got a Healthy Aging Grant for the population that’s 59 and older within our community,” Aultman said. “A portion of it needs to go towards food assistance, and Shared Harvest is going to be the vendor to do that work for us.”

He said it is for all services rendered from November of last year through the end of August. The Governor put it together at the end of last year with funds being divided for food, housing, care, and digital and internet literacy.

“They give us half of it to use with our community any way we deem fit for our 59 and older population. Of which, Commissioner Holmes has been working close with the City of Greenville to do the countywide transportation,” Aultman said.

The transportation is to help senior citizens get to and from medical appointments and other mobility needs around the county. The program is in place for two years, and the funds will be distributed throughout that time.

“This contract with Shared Harvest is just a portion of it all. I believe 20 percent goes towards food, 20 percent goes toward housing, 10 percent for digital literacy, and the balance is set for our needs,” Aultman said.

Commissioner Combs has also been doing the side work in regards to digital literacy. He had talked with nursing homes and libraries to get access to computers for the start of the literacy with access to those resources.

The commissioners are also working to increase their digital security and data recovery within the county by updating their server operations.

“We updated our internet and email servers, and they have been working diligently since yesterday because with the fair, we don’t have a lot of people in and out of the offices making the change over easier,” Aultman said.

The storage has been increased with the bare metal rack system with hard drives. It is a two TB server to get all the county data on it. It is separated by department, but the current one the commissioners were discussing that day were all the in-county data: county courts, prosecutor, commissioners, dog warden, maintenance department, and coroner.

“Then on top of that server operations, is two quotes. One is for $44,357.93, and the other is for $16,662.94,” Aultman said. “The one quote covers the labor for both quotes, and there is also a data storage, cloud back up monthly fee that is per the contract service.”

It is seven cents per gigabit that is included, but it is going to be billed dependant upon the storage, so if they do not use it, they get billed upon the gigabits of storage they are actually using.

“That is going to be a reoccurring cost to the county, but I think if you look at things, it is currently taking us 26 to 27 hours to backup of systems every day,” Aultman said. “By the time you get it done, you are already starting your secondary backup.”

He said the update will speed the process up more efficiently, and it is only backing up the daily changes instead of the whole drive.

“We are also taking some of that and backing up the data in county so it is not all going to the cloud,” Aultman said. “This will help if we get hacked, as we have the ability to maintain the continuation of operations in the county with this upgrade.”

The plans to finalize the operations will be during Columbus Day due to offices being closed on that Monday, so no county work will be interrupted or disturbed.

The commissioners meet every Tuesday and Thursday in the Administrative Building at 520 S Broadway in Greenville. Their Regular Sessions are open and welcome to the public and start at 1:30 p.m.

To contact Daily Advocate Reporter Meladi Brewer, email [email protected].