In 2019 the Fullerton Police Department wrestled control of the Information Technology functions of Fullerton from Administrative Services and put them under the purview of the Chief of Police.

In that time the budget has more than doubled, going from about $3Million ($3,028,203) in expenditures in the 2018-2019 budget to just over $7Million ($7,272,296) this year.

Back in 2021 the City seemed to be using some of that money to develop a brand spanking new website that, today, is…. broken as all hell.

We were told that it would 4 months for “content migration” and 10-14 months to finish the website. That was June of 2021. It is currently 19 months later.

If one navigates to CityofFullerton.com and hits the “Residents” tab this is what you’re met with;

11 broken links, 2 duplicates, 1 incorrect link and 2 links that take you to pages that themselves are broken.

That’s 15 of 54 links that are broken or useless (not counting the street sweeping duplicate that makes sense) for a broken rate of 28%.

The “Residents” tab is by the worst, which is sad to be honest because that’s the tab that’s the most likely to be used (and we’re the ones paying for the site). No part of the City’s website is unscathed or fully functioning.

Here’s the “About Us” menu;

4 broken links, one link (Events) that takes you to nothing but more broken links, and 4 duplicate links.

Here’s the “Government” menu;

This one was interesting because there’s an old JPA Study for the now-defunct Fire JPA, a decade old Joe Nation Report and one Sister City link that’s a broken version of the other, duplicate, Sister City link.

Here’s the “Business” menu;

The Business menu is the only one without broken links but it’s poorly designed and has “Business Registration” in three separate places that all lead to the same page.

This is all top-level stuff. Basic website navigation. The more you dig into the website, the more broken it gets.

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I first really noticed this when I was looking up what happened to First Night in Fullerton and was met with a “Page not Found” error on the City’s website. Then I ran into similar problems when trying to write about the recent Resident Only Parking Permit issue.

Really it’s a joke and the City’s webmaster, as well as the Chief of Police who now overseas this department, should be ashamed of themselves.

If you try to see what Council or a Commission is up to you’re taken to a “Legislative Information Center” page and even that’s broken;

The more you navigate, the worse is gets.

Meeting minutes are, at best, hit and miss and past agendas are no better;

This is NOT how open government is supposed to work and certainly not what we’re paying to get.

I could go on and on and on about how broken the City’s website is and how often we get met with “Page not Found” or redundant or pointless links. That’s just what’s broken and doesn’t even get into how hard it is to navigate when searching for data (no boolean search options, poor OCR scanning, etc).

Now for context and history, Information Technology was put under the Chief of Police for a stupid and bullshit reason: Dropbox.

Here’s the City’s explanation from the 01 January 2020 meeting;

In June of this 2019, information of a legally protected and sensitive nature belonging to the City of Fullerton was discovered on the Internet. Immediately, a need for a security review of the City's Information Technology operation was identified and oversight of City of Fullerton IT was assigned to the Office of the Chief of Police.

The “Review” would have shown that the City Attorney broke the law and their legal duty by not securing said “legally protected and sensitive” information.

The conclusion of any “security review” would have further shown that the data that the City put on Dropbox, emphasis is needed here, THAT THE CITY PUT ON DROPBOX, had absolutely nothing to do with any security problems facing any other aspect of the City’s networks, infrastructure or any other aspect of Information Technology.

Not a single dime of “Information Technology” money that has been spent, the more than doubling of the IT budget, has anything to do with the reasoning given to put that budget under the auspices of the Police Department.

My cynical take is that PD, the least budget conscious or taxpayer friendly department (except for perhaps Fire), saw an opportunity to devour IT and take another chunk of the budget for their own purposes.

That they can’t sort out a website gives me pause that they’re capable of solving any other, bigger or more problematic, info-tech issues.

The most charitable reading of the situation is that the City screwed up with the Dropbox kerfuffle and did a security audit to find out how stuff got published. While doing that, but separate to it, the City found out that everything was broken. Under this theory I have to assume that not a single ethernet cable in the city was working to justify the budget increases but let’s go with it.

Under this pretense we can maybe, possibly, but not really wash away the budget increases because we might be in a situation of having to fix years of neglect, malfeasance and incompetence.

But that would require the City to have had neglect, malfeasance, and incompetence and I’m yet to ever, once see the City admit as much (let alone to what degree).

As far as I know not a single person was held to account for the the Dropbox problem. Worse nobody seems to have been fired for the years of neglect that necessitated hiring Glass Box Digital and moving IT under PD.

The solution was to more than double the budget and quietly pretend like everything is fine and normal without a single discussion as to how we really got here.

That’s a real problem because if the City refuses to admit what got us here they’ll never be able to troubleshoot similar problems in the future.

This blind spot for neglect, malfeasance, and incompetence is how a City finds itself paying a webmaster over $100k/year and still somehow having a website where the most basic of links don’t work.

That’s $102,395 after salary and benefits. I expect basic HTML to work for that cost.

Then again, we are talking about a webmaster who, on his own City contact page, is listed as working in “information technologyu”.

I emailed “Super Steven” to ask why our website was so broken but no response was forthcoming before press time. I would have called him directly but his contact information is as broken as the City’s website navigation.

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