‘This is insane’: Tarrant leaders put heat on courts software launch, exploring options
Tarrant County leaders are beginning talks about stepping away from a courts software program that has been in the works for 12 years.
A representative from TechShare came to Tuesday’s Commissioners Court meeting to give updates on the long awaited TechShare.Courts program, software designed to handle documents.
While the conversation did not provide many answers, county leaders appeared to move toward the same page about possible next steps after being divided.
County Judge Tim O’Hare said county leaders are at a point where they need to determine if it was time to cut its losses.
Taxpayers have spent $26.6 million on TechShare.Courts since 2011. County leaders have yet to get it off the ground.
That price tag continues to climb. County commissioners put another $515,000 toward the program on March 7, but costs may reach up to $6.3 million. Renee Tidwell, the county auditor, said Tuesday there were an additional $3 million in invoices that had not been paid for TechShare.Courts.
If TechShare.Courts does not go live by its planned May 1 launch date and county leaders continue to try to get it off the ground, even more money will be sunk into the program. A contract extension for another month with the main frame provider costs $150,000 and other costs could add another $150,000, county administrator G.K. Maenius said.
John Dahill, executive director of TechShare, gave a lengthy rundown of TechShare’s history across the state before he faced a barrage of questions from the commissioners over the course of nearly an hour.
TechShare.Courts has a long and complicated statewide history. Tarrant County originally signed on with Travis and Dallas counties to develop software through TechShare that they could sell to other counties.
Travis left the program in 2016 after spending $3.3 million. Dallas backed out after spending $35 million.
Reviews of TechShare.Courts’ source code, including one commissioned by Dallas County, found issues with the program. One analysis from the Texas Conference of Urban Counties suggested rewriting the code.
Bumps in the road have kept Tarrant County leaders pushing back the launch date. A vendor bankruptcy and county officials discovering the program did not work hindered the program’s launch, which was supposed to happen October 2022.
That date was pushed to New Year’s. Then the end of January. County officials discussed launching the program April 1 before settling on May 1.
Dahill told the commissioners that the program will have flaws, but they won’t be anything that can’t be resolved. Commissioner Roy Brooks said he was tired of hearing excuses.
“May 1 is your drop dead date,” Brooks said.
“I get it,” Dahill responded.
Commissioner Alisa Simmons said she appreciated learning the history, but she was “extremely concerned” about the courts program.
“If you look at your history that we have on that page, we have been developing courts since 2011,” Simmons said. “And this is 2023.”
Neither county administrators nor Dahill could immediately answer Simmons’ questions about the the original quote and budget. Maenius said the county could get Simmons those numbers, and Simmons told him her staff had asked and still had not received them.
“Did you originally have a project kickoff to discuss a timeline?” Simmons asked.
“Absolutely,” Dahill responded.
“OK, and I bet it did not project out to 2023,” Simmons said, to which Dahill responded, “I bet it didn’t.”
County leaders and Dahill also did not have an answer to Simmon’s question on what the original date to go live was.
“I believe that this rollout, this May 1 rollout, is premature,” Simmons said. “I think you’re only doing it because a commissioner is asking questions ... I’m very afraid that we may implement something that, it just fails.”
County Clerk Mary Louise Nicholson told Simmons that with her 20 years of experience, she would not roll out a program that would damage the court system.
“We’ve been with the software, we helped develop it,” Nicholson said. “Should we be in the software business? I don’t know. But your predecessors put us in that business, and we’re doing the best we can and I believe we’re going go live May 1.”
District Clerk Tom Wilder told the commissioners another 400 processes were still open with the program.
“Can we make May 1?” Wilder said. “It will be tight. We’re very, very close.”
Wilder said he agreed with Simmons, and said if the program crashed the criminal justice system, it would be a “disaster of major proportions.”
Brooks clarified that his push for the May 1 launch date did not mean he wanted the county to launch an unfinished program.
“We have extended the go-live date several times, and each time we have extended the go-live date, we have extended the life of the mainframe,” Brooks said. “Nobody is going to shut down that mainframe until there is something competent to replace it. It ain’t going to happen, and we are not going to crash the criminal justice system in Tarrant County.”
Simmons said if she held a town hall and she explained her constituents how much money the county had spent on an unlaunched program, she didn’t think she would would stand a chance at re-election.
“This is insane,” she said. “This is not fiscally responsible. This is just throwing money at something and it just doesn’t work.”
Commissioner Manny Ramirez said what he disagreed with most is that the county started a nonprofit that operated outside the county using taxpayer dollars.
He asked leaders what the cost would be to get out of the project and if anyone was exploring it.
“If we were to let TechShare compete for our business, instead of us looking at it as the sunk cost fallacy, we’ve thrown so much money into this that we might as well keep on going,” Ramirez said. “That’s not the way to look at it.”
Ramirez said that if the program does not launch May 1, “there’s zero reason to continue to believe that it will.” He asked the other commissioners what their appetite was to start exploring getting out of TechShare.Courts if it doesn’t work May 1.
O’Hare, the county judge, said that instead of blaming others for what has happened with TechShare.Courts, the county needed to come up with a solution. He suggested bringing the item back next meeting about what to do next with the courts program.
Dahill told O’Hare there was no business plan for TechShare and that there has never been one. O’Hare said the county attempting to run a private sector through the government was why it was in this position.
“I think what we need to do is take a good, long, hard look at what we want to do with this moving forward,” O’Hare said, and said he wanted to know what products were on the market for civil court software programs.
Commissioners meet again May 2.
This story was originally published April 19, 2023 at 12:53 PM.
