The Dallas County Commissioners Court has authorized the purchase of new network connectivity equipment for the Frank Crowley Courts Building.

The court approved this purchase during its latest meeting on June 20.

Renovations to the eighth and ninth floors of the building were approved in June 2022, but the plans did not include the equipment necessary to complete the internet connections for the occupants of the newly renovated offices.

“As part of this project, new IT closets are required to provide network connectivity for computers and other support equipment required by the departments that will occupy these spaces,” states a briefing from the court.

“The 8th floor was shell space, where no network existed, and the 9th-floor renovation exceeds the capacity of the existing network and requires additional equipment to support the new staff that will be present in these areas,” it continued.

The location of the renovation work is the south side of the eighth-floor 4C Court, the Criminal Justice Department and the Pre-Trial Department, and the ninth-floor Public Defenders Office. The cost of the new equipment and materials is nearly $619,000.

Per the contract with Cisco Systems, this one-time purchase package includes permanent virtual connections, routers and related equipment, data storage, miscellaneous IT hardware, peripherals, components, and more. The briefing says that Dallas County will purchase the materials only, and the County IT department will handle the installation of these items.

The Facilities Management team and the Dallas County IT Department collaborated to develop the list of materials required for the project.

Meanwhile, the City of Dallas is still apparently grappling with the internet-related after-effects of a ransomware attack on City servers in May. Some of the City’s websites have yet to recover, including the Dallas Police Department’s operational dashboard, which has not been updated since May.

Officials have yet to restore the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard to full capability, as previously reported by The Dallas Express. Investigations into the cyber attack are still ongoing.