Harbour Grace council casts an eye to the cloud

By Alexandra Brothers, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter / September 1, 2023 Edition

The Town of Harbour Grace is looking to implement some changes that will improve council proceedings. At a virtual council meeting held last month, councillors discussed the issue of the Town’s ongoing infrastructure challenges regarding the lack of a functioning council office.

“The problems are real,” for Harbour Grace councillors, said finance committee chairman and councillor Gordon Stone.

While talks of repairs to the current council office and the development of offices at the Danny Clearly Harbour Grace Community Centre have occurred, no conclusions have been reached.

Consequently, Stone put forward a motion to establish a committee designated solely to resolve the issue. The committee is to be comprised of select council members who will come up with a detailed recommendation on how to resolve the situation and bring forward a recommendation to council. Stone’s motion was passed unanimously.

The Town is also making improvements on a digital level. The Town’s digital server, called Town Suite, has become outdated. Councillor Stone referred to Town Suite as “the digital heartbeat of Harbour Grace” as the software contains all of the Town’s records. Stone discussed the necessity of upgrading to Town Suite Cloud, an internet-accessible server. The new system will offer a fully managed hosted server for Harbour Grace’s municipal data, meaning the Town would no longer be required to maintain a server for Town Suite. The Cloud would also offer security as it does a daily back-up, and further, it would allow councillors to access Town Suite from any municipally authorized device, Stone said, arguing the Town doesn’t have an alternative.

“Our system went down this week,” Mayor Don Coombs said of the current Town Suite. “We’re lucky to survive it. But we spent days trying to get it back up. We cannot afford that.”

The new annual total cost for the server will be $9,081 + HST. This cost is also subject to any inflationary increases.

The motion to update from Town Suite to Town Suite Cloud passed unanimously.