Former Madison County administrator Joseph Parente left behind a computer no one can start, according to information technology director Ron Dorman.
“There’s no operating system on it,” Dorman said on March 6.
“What Parente did is better than Hillary Clinton. We don’t know what he did. How did he do it?”
Parente was contacted for comment on March 9, but has not returned a phone call.
Dorman said former county board chairman Alan Dunstan deleted photographs and documents from his computer, but not beyond all recovery.
He said he sent both computers to Data Tech in Colorado, which revived some of what Dunstan deleted.
At a meeting of the county board’s information technology committee on March 6, Dorman reported on efforts to bring county board members into the county email system.
Committee member Ann Gorman raised questions about the effort, saying that stories were running rampant that people were looking at email of county board members.
Freedom of information officer Cynthia Ellis, who was present at the meeting, said that if she received a request for anyone’s email, she would contact that person first.
“No one is looking at your emails,” Ellis said.
Gorman responded with, “There is no effort to review emails of county board members and elected officials?”
Ellis told her that if she received a request, “I would contact you first.”
Dorman also said there was no initiative of looking at emails of board members.
He said the effort to bring all county board members into the county’s system was to standardize operations.
He described a possible freedom of information request and said he wouldn’t be able to comply with it if county board members were not part of the county email system.
Gorman said it was interesting that this was being done for freedom of information.
Ellis responded: “It’s not just FOIA. We had a member that got hacked and we learned about it from the sheriff.”
Gorman asked if it was confidential.
“They told us we got hacked and that was it,” Ellis said.