LAWTON — The Comanche County Board of Commissioners is moving toward creating a more secure email system for the county’s volunteer fire departments and small police departments.
After hearing from Emergency Management Director Clint Langford, the board voted 3-0 May 8 to provide .gov email addresses for 20 VFDs and seven police departments as part of a project to obtain a more secure email system. The decision allows the departments to migrate toward the new system and gives the board time to explore options for funding the VFDs’ email licenses after June 30, which marks the end of the county’s fiscal year.
The VFDs and police departments all receive reports from Lawton’s 911 dispatch center, which had a security upgrade in 2022, Langford said.
“That’s a lot of data that’s received about call times, call volume, locations – some pertinent information – and that has to be transmitted via a secure email account,” he said. “A Gmail or a Yahoo or a Hotmail is not secure enough for a 911 center, because there’s some sensitive data that needs to be transmitted.”
Following the dispatch center’s upgrade, the VFDs and police departments switched to the organizational email account comanchecounty.us, Langford said. But he said those departments will need to start using .gov addresses instead.
“It’s got to be all or none,” he said. “Either we move the fire departments over to .govs or we just cut off their .us, because now it’s creating problems with everyone else’s.”
Langford’s comments prompted a discussion about how the county will pay for the departments’ email licenses in the future.
Langford said American Rescue Plan Act dollars will pay for converting the departments to .gov addresses, but county officials will eventually have to find another source of funding for departments’ email licenses. He said those licenses could cost about $1,500 to $1,600 per year altogether, but VFD chiefs have said they would be willing to pay for the licenses if necessary.
The commissioners agreed that the departments needed a secure email system, but they wondered how the county would pay for it going forward.
Chairman Johnny Owens said the county needs to ensure that its email system is secure.
“The communication is the main thing,” he said. “I’d rather feel safe and know everybody’s got good communication than worry about a few dollars.”
Commissioner Josh Powers wondered if the county could use a single email address, such as comanchecountyok.gov, for all departments instead of maintaining separate .gov address for each department.
“Obviously, we don’t want to give every individual firefighter a .gov,” he said. “But for the one, the main one that comes in, is that a possibility?”
County Clerk Carrie Tubbs said VFDs are essentially separate entities, and it was not clear whether the county could use ARPA dollars to pay for each department’s license.
“That would be a state auditor question if that was allowable,” she said.
‘Full migration’
Langford asked the board to allow creation of the comanchecountyok.gov email address for VFDs and rural police departments through the end of June, which would give officials until the end of the fiscal year to settle the funding question.
“The main thing is just to go ahead and move over with a full migration, so the entire project is not being compromised,” he said.