Winnsboro Town Council voted unanimously at their Aug. 7 meeting to turn over the creation and maintenance of a new town Web site to Splash Omnimedia of Lexington.
“Splash will be our best vendor,” Connie Shackleford, Grants Administrator, said. “They’re not the lowest bid, but they will work with us, and their ‘back end’ (of their Web site) is easier to work with.”
Shackleford added that Splash was eager to add a municipality to their client list and would likely use the Winnsboro site as a showpiece to attract future towns and governments.
Winnsboro will shell out $12,850 for the site, plus a yearly maintenance fee of $1,428.
Other companies competing for the contract were Red-Dog Marketing, VC3 and Civis Plus. Red-Dog submitted a bid of $9,000, plus a yearly maintenance fee of $3,600. Red-Dog’s proposed site was limited to 35 pages, and video streaming would have been $1,200 extra. VC3 offered a price of $13,320, plus an annual fee of $1,116. Mobile applications and social media networking would have been $1,000 extra, each. Civis Plus submitted an offer of $17,644, plus an annual fee of $7,881 with a 36-month contract.
Council also voted to pony up $500 for paint and supplies to paint the Town’s flower pots lining Congress Street, and offered to send a street sweeper to clear the parking lot of a new restaurant opening in the old Captain’s Galley location just outside the Town limits.
Public Safety officer William Gonzales told Council that a pair of lightning strikes at the station had severely damaged the department’s computer and communications networks. While insurance is covering a great deal of replacement costs, Gonzales said the Town should brace themselves to pay anywhere between $10,000 and $15,000 out of pocket.
Councilman Bill Haslett reported that the County had begun enforcing their new building and zoning codes and that he has seen numerous red stickers all over town (indicating a violation).
“I don’t always agree with everything the County does,” Haslett said, “but I agree with this. It has made a difference, and I hope the Town will have the guts to go forward and clean up our town and follow suit with what the County is doing. When you ride through our town, there’s a lot of it that’s in pretty bad shape.”
Haslett said he has collected more than 30 photographs of some of the town’s worst eyesores, which he said he will present to Town Council at their next meeting (Aug. 21) in an effort to goad them into action.
