[StBernard] St. Bernard Parish Council pulls items in agenda for this week's meeting, cites computer virus

[Westley Annis]

St. Bernard Parish Council pulls items in agenda for this week's meeting,
cites computer virus
Print Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune By Benjamin
Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
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on June 16, 2014 at 4:15 PM, updated June 16, 2014 at 4:53 PM

The St. Bernard Parish Council announced on Monday that it had to pull all
agenda items up for adoption because of a computer virus that infected
parish computers. The virus prevented the local official journal from
receiving email messages announcing the agenda items, so they were never
published in that newspaper as required by law, according to Clerk of
Council Roxanne Adams.

"All ordinances that were introduced at the June 3 meeting cannot be adopted
because those emails were not received," Adams said.

Parish President Dave Peralta confirmed that parish computers became
infected on Friday, but he said the problem appeared to have cleared by
Monday.

"We don't know for sure what happened," Peralta said on Monday afternoon.
"We think someone tied in a personal computer into our system somehow."

He said the parish has "put in some additional firewalls to try and stop it
from happening again.

"We have some systems people in there right now looking at it," he added.

Because the proposed ordinances were not published in the parish's official
journal, the St. Bernard Voice newspaper, most of the items instead now are
scheduled to be addressed at the 7 p.m. July 1 council meeting. While some
items still can be introduced at the 3 p.m. Tuesday (June 17) meeting, no
items can be adopted.

The Parish Council had been scheduled to hold a public hearing at the
Tuesday meeting about proposed charter amendments that would give council
members more power over parish contracting, hiring council employees, and
appointments to boards.

The council had been scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to send the
charter amendments to the ballot, as early as November. Voters still would
have had to approve the amendments for any changes to take effect.

Now, that public hearing and the vote on those amendments has been pushed
back to July 1, along with many other council items.

Adams said on Tuesday that the council bond attorney likely would file for
an extension so that those amendments still could make it onto the Nov. 4
ballot if the council approves them at the July 1 meeting.

See the initial Tuesday agenda by clicking here.
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/06/because_of_computer_virus_st_
b.html