By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Ortonville- During the Monday night meeting, the council approved with a 7-0 vote to pay an invoice from IGD Solutions for email archiving.
It was discovered during a current investigation into staff emails that the emails were archived for about two weeks, and the extra $40 per month for October and November will upgrade to archiving for a year.
“I provided you with a copy of an invoice that I received from IGD Solutions for email archiving,” said Dale Stuart, village manager. “I did not request this from IGD Solutions, and I had nothing from the council to make that recommendation, so I brought it to you if it’s going to be paid it needs to be approved by the council.”
Trustee Coleen Skornicka said that she had asked for the upgrade to archiving. She is currently the trustee representative on the IT committee, which consists of one trustee and three office staff.
“During the research of the emails, it was discovered that the email archiving does not archive as long as we need it to, and therefore they said there would be additional billing for that,” said Skornicka. “Since Council went ahead and approved up to $500 for this research, I went ahead and told them to put that on there for the archiving for October. They do bill in advance for November, and we can discuss it, but it was all discovered during this email investigation that the email archiving needs to go back further than what it currently does, so based on that, they sent this invoice out.”
There was some question as to if this purchase was part of the investigation, which Skornicka said it was not part of the investigation. Some members of council were concerned that this purchase was unauthorized.

“No trustee should be making any decision on payment or obligating the village for any expenditure without the approval of council or bring it to the village manager and allow him to use his authority for that,” said trustee Larry Hayden. “We did not approve changing our email contract, we approved expenditures for an investigation that is supposed to be handled by the IT committee, not an individual trustee. I have serious problems with how this is handled.”
Skornicka said that due to the investigation, which potentially involves the office staff, she did not discuss the purchase with them. While the method of the purchase was questioned, Stuart and the council agreed that the archiving need to go back further than two weeks.
“If we only had two weeks of archiving for our emails, I believe that is woefully inadequate,” said Stuart. “I believe we should have something longer than that just for research purposes.”