After Ice Storms, Northlake, TX Builds Resilience with OpenGov

Video Transcript

In Texas, we had a massive ice storm. And so for two days, everything was down. We could not, one we couldn’t get people to work. We could not come in and do things on a regular basis. We couldn’t even put update our website, because that was also hosted on our servers. Our phone service was down. So we couldn’t put an away message. We realized that we were 100% tied to place.

The first day of the ice storm. It was the day we needed to do payroll. And so we sent police officers out to my utility billing clerk’s home and picked her and her child up because she didn’t have a babysitter because the ice storm.

But that right there was a big catalyst when we got to the budget and budget cycle, I said, we have to get a on cloud ERP because if we can’t run payroll during an ice storm when someone gets sick.

And then we had one more event which was: everything’s fine, clear day, sunny weather, nothing bad looks like on the horizon. And someone was installing a technology line on our telecommunications line between buildings and they knit our line that went from our building to our servers. So we had access to our internet. We didn’t have access to our servers

There’s other ways that you can be risk averse and look at these things. And so sometimes it’s as simple as find your lead people. Those people you say you can’t survive without and make them take a two week vacation and see if you can move and process things without them.

So moving to the cloud represents at least to me and my team members is the ability to grow along with the software. And so there’s a lot of benefits to being on a new emergent software that is growing and changing and evolving because we’re doing that too as a town. We’re doubling our population roughly every two to three years right now. 

I love being a part of smart growth and making sure that we can make long term plans and changes that will help us be prepared for what’s going to come in the future 

That’s what good governance is – the ability sleep peacefully at night, knowing that things around you are stable.

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