POLICE BLOTTER: County has plan to fix Y2K glitch: Pencil and paper Bill Montgomery - Staff Thursday  February 24

DeKalb County has a contingency plan to handle a Y2K glitch that snarled the county's computerized jail-to-court record of inmates and defendants:

An old-fashioned thing known as paper. As in written inmate lists and court dockets.

The County Commission will discuss the problem with a dozen county legal and judicial officials, including District Attorney J. Tom Morgan, today at the Maloof Administration Center.

DeKalb CEO Liane Levetan also will attend, her schedule permitting, said county communications director Susan Howell.

Gale Walldorff, presiding officer of the commission, said the meeting is "an effort to get a better understanding" of the glitch that had Morgan, among others, concerned that dangerous inmates could be released on bond because their records had been swallowed into cyberspace.

"I can say I've not heard of a single occurrence of anybody being released from jail who was not supposed to," William Hilton, DeKalb information systems director, said late last week.

Morgan confirmed that he was satisfied with Hilton's assessment. "The biggest problem, and one the commissioners need to be aware of, is the overtime salaries for the hours our people are putting in to transfer all this data to paper. It's going to be expensive," Morgan said Monday.

The county's former computerized case management and jail management systems were found not to be Y2K-compliant last fall and had to be scrapped.

"We're working on restoring the link between the two and expect it will be up before the end of February," Hilton said. "But we have a paper system in place that mirrors the electronic system, and it is working."

County Public Defender Lawrence Schneider has expressed concern about security of his defense and said he won't link up with the new system if it means yielding control of computers containing his files on defendants.

"The Information Systems Department is charged with protecting all county data, not looking at it," Levetan responded. "There is no desire on their part to access data in any county department or agency except to restore it if it is destroyed or lost."

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 25, 2000