Did Anyone Else Know We Had a New Franklin County Auditor?

By On September 6, 2009 · 3 Comments

So my wife and I had a ‘discussion’ tonight about our neighbor’s name. I’m convinced his name is Jeff. She’s not so sure.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to find out the answer because the Franklin County Auditor’s Property Search page no longer works.

And while I didn’t find out my neighbor’s name, I did find out something when I visited the Auditor’s site: we have a new auditor! Oh, and he’s a black Republican! (seriously!)

After a little research I learned that Joe Testa retired a few weeks ago. And because he was a Republican, the Franklin County GOP got to choose his replacement: Clarence E. Mingo II.

I’m initially inclined to make fun of Clarence for a number of reasons: 1. He’s a black Republican 2. He has a hilariously Republican mustache and 3. He’s a black Republican???

But I’m left wondering many, many more things, like why didn’t we have a special election for this office and will Mr. Mingo II be running for auditor when we do have an election and when will that election be.

But mainly I’m left wondering: why the fuck doesn’t the property search page work?

Mr. Mingo II?

note: here’s what I see when I try to research my neighbors’ house…

FranklinCountyAuditorFAIL

 

  • A little more research finds Testa claiming that “Mingo is both competent and electable” as he turned over the office to the new auditor.

    This, despite the fact that Mingo LOST to Democrat Maryellen O’Shaughnessy for Franklin County Clerk of Court in 2008.

  • Could be down because bots are trying to scrape the database. That’s been happening fairly frequently of late to property databases.

  • One could make the case that the auditor’s office should be auditing their own systems to prevent this kid of thing so that, at the very least, we are given a meaningful “sorry, we’re working on the system” message instead of a generic 503 message from their Apache server.

    But I’m assuming the office outsources the property search system to a company that specializes in this kind of thing. And that company should most definitely have monitoring set up to track this kind of outage as well as the people and technology in place to recover from it very quickly.

    It’s been down over 12 hours now and I don’t give a crap of it’s labor day or not that IS NOT an acceptable outage.

    If I was the new auditor I would seriously start reviewing the contract with this company.

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