Glynn County launched a website redesign on Aug. 20 with the intention of making information easier for residents to access. As a result, website visitors can no longer easily access information about flooding, road design, police equipment procurement, contracts, or other decisions that took place from 2019 through the end of 2022.
Links to documents discussed at nearly 200 meetings are broken, according to an analysis by The Current GA. The new site, however, has made it impossible to read many records from county commission meetings and other municipal agencies over a four-year period.
Additionally, the directory from the county’s old website that listed commission meeting minutes all the way back to 1940 is missing from the new site. Rather than a couple of mouse clicks, the only way for the public to access these historical records is through an open records request, a sometimes lengthy and cumbersome process.
The Current GA alerted the county to the issue of unusable page links in early October, and it’s unclear whether any county official was aware of the problem before then. The document archives accessible on the original website have been essential to The Current’s reporting, notably for the story about county funding for the St. Simons Marina.
The county’s communications director, Brittany Dozier, said Glynn County transitioned its archived documents from an older system to Munidocs to improve searchability and access. She confirmed that the hard-to-access information still exists in the county’s servers and acknowledged the problem of accessibility.
“While some older agenda links may appear broken, all documents are safely stored and being cataloged in the new system. Users can expect smoother navigation soon, with redirects and search tools underway to help locate any missing files. In the meantime, anyone needing specific records can submit an open records request at glynncounty-ga.nextrequest.com/requests/new,” she said.
The county approved an $189,000 contract to vendor Interpersonal Frequency on April 18, 2024, using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds for the redesign. At a presentation on July 15, 2025, the county’s head of digital service, Kim Ransom, said that the IT department was working on a document repository “for keeping our minutes, our agendas, accessible.”
She also said that the redesign would feature an improved search function for commission meeting minutes. “We don’t have that now, but this is something that will be implemented before launch,” Ransom said.
That work appears not to have been finished before the website relaunch. An analysis by The Current reveals that links to commission meeting minutes from 2019-2022 were not updated along with the website redesign.
Thousands of links on a site need to be updated during a major rebuild. When links are omitted from the update, it often leads to a problem called “link rot.” The solution is to check for broken links and replace them with new, working URLs.
For example, links in these 2022 minutes are broken because they point to out-of-date web addresses. Glynn County still has the documents, but the links do not redirect users to the documents. The “intelligent word search feature” also does not work for documents before 2022 if someone searches for a keyword in their archives.
The technical problems also extend to other agencies, such as the Sheriff’s Department, which also participated in the website updates. The inmate population reports for the county detention center, for example, are not available on the website, other than the latest month’s statistics. The missing information includes the foreign nationals report, which is a monthly report on inmates not born in the United States in Glynn County custody.
Data reporter Maggie Lee assisted in this reporting.