T-L Photo/GAGE VOTA Belmont County Commissioner Vince Gianangeli says that he recently attended his first County Commissioners Association of Ohio’s Winter Conference in Columbus.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The Belmont County Board of Commissioners said that the county’s OnSolve CodeRed system, used to make emergency notifications to the public, is running again.

Belmont County recently was the victim of a cybersecurity incident due to the third party provider of the system that had a data breach.

Commissioner J.P. Dutton said that Belmont County 911 director Bryan Minder recently informed him that his department is currently working on fixing minor hiccups but the system is back up and operational.

“Cuyahoga County also had a similar issue with a similar vendor,” Dutton said. “We want to continue and make sure it is as effective and efficient as possible.”

CodeRed is used to notify residents for various incidents such as evacuation notices, utility outages, water main breaks, fires, floods, chemical spills, and other critical incidents.

Dutton added that residents can go to Belmont County 911’s website at www.belmontcounty911.com to check for any updates.

The commission also announced it will not hold its regularly scheduled meeting on Dec. 24 due to it being Christmas Eve. Dutton said that the meeting will not be rescheduled, but instead be canceled due to the holiday.

“There’ll be no meeting held the week of Dec. 21 due to the Christmas holiday. And we will be moving our meeting to Tuesday, Dec. 30 instead of Wednesday, Dec. 31. We will hold a meeting at 1 p.m. due to the New Year’s holiday,” Dutton said. “We’re required by Ohio Revised Code to have 50 meetings a year. As we do every year, we will meet or exceed that goal.”

He added that Wednesday morning’s meeting met the requirement of 50 meetings for 2025.

“If we feel compelled to meet or take action during that time, the media will be notified of such and given notice that we’re doing that,” Dutton said. “As we wrap up the year, as of right now, we are planning to meet on Dec. 30, potentially for budgetary reasons, and if that changes, again, we will alert the media.”

Commissioner Jerry Echemann added that all three members of the board recently attended the County Commissioners Association of Ohio’s Winter Conference in Columbus.

He said that it was interesting to meet with various county commissioners and discuss how different boards run their meetings.

“Many counties, even some smaller ones, hold two business meetings each week,” Echemann said.

Dutton agreed with him that the conference was productive and it was interesting to see how different boards run their counties.

“There’s a lot of variety. I think that every county is a little bit unique in terms of how they handle their meetings. There’s some that just meet one time a week as well,” Dutton said. “What was interesting about CCO is you get to talk with other commissioners and try to learn those little things about how other counties do things differently than we may here.”

He added that, when speaking with the other county commissioners, it allows him to learn things that he may want to change and learn how to implement those changes.

“Sometimes you pick up on things that you’d want to change and other times you’re like, I don’t think I like that as much. I think I like the way that we do it,” Dutton said.