Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Fix is unethical and breaks law

Posted in: PATA


This just makes me so angry. Yet another reason I deeply regret voting for this baboon.

Listen folks, I am in the technology business and what this Gilleland woman says below is comparing apples to oranges. If the city does not have enough memory in their servers it has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with this Fix baboon forwarding his emails to a private account. His manipulation of the system is strictly to avoid public records requests and violate state law and our trust.

Michael Sabatino, I demand that you make a public records request for all emails sent and received from jfix@steakexcape.com.

President Wisniewski, I demand that you report this incident to the state ethics commission. By God, WHEN are you going to stop the illegal and unethical activities on this council ????

City Law Director, I demand you contact Stake Escape Enterprises to inform them that one of their employees is abusing their trust and technology to violate state law.

And to the rest of council, the mayor and the city staff management, SHAME ON YOU for not having the technical skills necessary on your staff to assure that this violation of public trust isn?’t able to happen.


City addressing e-mail memory issues
Thursday, October 26, 2006
By SEAN CASEY
ThisWeek Staff Writer

Pickerington is addressing a recently discovered technology problem at City Hall that one councilman fears may threaten the thoroughness of public-records retention.

City Manager Judy Gilleland said the municipality has allocated as much as $10,000 to expand the backup memory capacity on computer servers for e-mail communications routed through the city system. The lack of backup memory has resulted in the loss of logs tracking messages to or forwarded from city e-mail accounts to e-mail addresses outside of the system.


The discrepancy, which Gilleland attributed to outdated technology, does not affect records maintained for city e-mail accounts.
Gilleland said staff members are discussing potential solutions with the city's service provider, which are estimated to cost between $5,000 and $10,000.


''We're a growing city and there's a lot of areas we need to grow in and take care of, and that includes our technology,'' she said.


Facility operations administrator Eric Vannatta uncovered the problem earlier this month when Councilman Michael Sabatino filed a public records request for e-mail communications among council members, Sabatino said.


The log for the city e-mail account for Councilman Jeff Fix, who forwards the messages to a separate work account, erroneously showed no activity.


Sabatino said this discrepancy may endanger the integrity of the city's record-retention system because officials have no way of knowing if all communications are accounted for in city files.
''The city should be able to ensure that they have all of the records they must keep, by law,'' Sabatino said. ''For a private individual, this would probably be fine, but for a governmental entity with the responsibility to maintain records, this is not adequate.''


All council members are given city e-mail addresses. Fix said he automatically has messages to that address forwarded to a work mailbox because it is easier to maintain a single account as opposed to multiple ones.


He added that he did not know of the activity-log problem and keeps records of all communications, as city and state statutes require.

Gilleland said she is unaware of instances in which the discrepancy shielded the existence of any communications, but said the server upgrade should help alleviate those concerns.


The city also hopes to improve the rest of its technological systems in the next year.
A draft version of the city's 2007 budget includes a separate provision of up to $60,000 to upgrade the city's computer systems, but the document is still under review by the finance committee and must pass a full council vote for approval.

Why would they care?

What would be the point in contacting Steak Escape? Why would they care? They likely are enjoying the free publicity.

I had no idea that the citys email technology was still in the dark ages. Perhaps they need to think about upgrading rather than just putting another hamster on the wheel.

By TJ McCray
I assume....


I assume Steak Escape pays this boob to do something for them. Wouldn't it stand to reason that if they are paying him a salary from 9-5 and if he sends and receives a preponderance of emails during that time that they would be concerned about paying him for that as he draws another salary from the taxpayers?

Additionally, if he has found a way to circumvent security settings with the city email infrastructure and security protocols and put the entire city technical infrastructure at risk of intrusion that the same concerns should apply to Steak Escape?

Sure, it?’s free press for them, whoever they are, but as a network administrator myself, I sure would want to know if I had employees tampering and committing violations of corporate security protocols.

Besides if an idiot like this can hack around security at the city, what other sensitive information is at risk? I can tell you that my SSN among other sensitive data is at risk because I pay taxes here.

We assumed there were firewalls in place with the city to protect our privacy act data and we are wrong. We cannot assume Steak Escape has adequate firewalls in place that won?’t let a hacker from there to enter back into the city system and access privacy act data as well as employee information.

Come on folks. We read about sensitive information being stolen on a large scale every day. Where is the outrage that this is happening right under our noses and we sit idly by and do nothing about it?

Given the banal statements made by this technically challenged city manager we have to tolerate, she certainly doesn?’t grasp the ramifications of her inept staff allowing this to happen.

This is intolerable.
Don't care

Nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens. Nobody cares. The same people in office will do the same crap they have for years.

If this email fiasco is true, he should be removed from office. If the remainder of the council members are not actively investigating this they should be removed from office. Same goes for the Mayor.

Don't hold your breath. This is the council in a nutshell -

Brian - crusader against the township
Jeff - used car salesman
Heidi - clueless Governor helper wanna be
Keith - Fix puppet
Ted - unable to answer a question without a 5000 word dissertation
Cristie - biggest worry at council meetings is which outfit to wear
Mike - votes no to anything related to Diley Rd
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