LaFAYETTE — Following a weekend where county employees received no paycheck, county commissioners apologized at their Monday night meeting for the technological glitch that caused the delay.

“We have been working diligently to get everything back online and we have talked about the possibility of doing handwritten checks,” Chairman David Eastridge said. “We do apologize for this, but it was nothing we did on this end or we feel like the other end. If you have ever had a computer, I am sure you have had some comments to make about it. As we move forward, we will look into ways to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

Eastridge said that the county’s IT department worked through the weekend to find a solution and the system would be back up for checks to be handed out Tuesday morning.

Employees did receive their compensation in the form of paper checks Tuesday morning but County Manager Regina Chambers said that IT personnel are still working on the issue.

“We have a minor glitch that we are still trying to iron out, but we were able to access payroll,” she said.

The commission was also notified that Chambers County 911/EMA received a total of 97,302 calls in 2018, according to director Donnie Smith.

Smith spoke about emergency calls at Monday night’s meeting. He said that emergency personnel dispatched to 70,049 incidents of the nearly 100,000 calls. 

“Those were things that were entered in our system when someone called and someone was sent,” he said. “In this day and age where everyone has a cell phone, we get multiple, multiple, multiple calls whenever there is an incident on the interstate or on the main thoroughfares. It’s not uncommon for us to receive 25-30 calls on the same wreck.”

The month with the highest amount of calls made to the county was May with 9,081, 6,142 of which were individual incidents.

Smith said that with the numbers broken down into calls and incidents, about $3 was spent on each response.

“If you extrapolate out the just over half a million dollars or so that is our dispatcher payroll for our staff of 22 dispatchers, it comes out to about $3 per call,” he said. “I think that’s very reasonable, and we try to keep cost down and keep our quality up.”

Through these calls, Chambers County 911 was also able to assign 113 new addresses throughout the county in 2018.