Connecting a Community

A Reboot for City Hall

The City of Yreka provides many of the essential services residents need, like water and sewer, and they rely on cloud-based software. But before City of Yreka switched to Cal-Ore Fiber, city staffers could hardly depend on their internet signal.

“We used to have wireless antennas on a tank up on the hill,” says Shella Rhetta Hogan, Finance Director for the City of Yreka. “The internet would go out every time there was a storm.”

It was bad,” Hogan remembers. “Almost every Monday we were manually resetting the tower.”

So when Cal-Ore expanded its Fiber Internet network, offering bigger bandwidth and dramatically improved reliability, Hogan and the City of Yreka couldn’t help but be interested.

“When they showed me the pricing, I was like, ‘You’re kidding me! We can do this!’” Hogan says.

Connecting the City

From billing to budgeting, practically everything the City of Yreka does relies on the Internet. The City runs on Springbrook software to manage utilities, licensing, tax assessment and finance. This lets city administrators understand all their relationships with citizens in one place.

“Our citizens depend on us” says Hogan. “We can help the same citizen with building permits, dog licenses, utility bills or business licenses.”

The city’s services are connected, too. Yreka City Hall is wired with a point-to-point fiber connection to the Yreka Service Center or “Corporate Yard” – the city’s headquarters for its field staff, heavy equipment, fleet services and sewer plant. This connection allows everyone to run on one server at city hall and share one internet connection with no lag. Accessing information at the corporate yard is the same as at City Hall.

Managing the finances of a small town with big responsibilities and limited resources isn’t easy. Like many other communities in America, the common denominator for providing better service for the community is reliable, affordable internet service.  “With Cal-Ore, it’s a lot more simple,” Hogan says. “We got fiber and now life is better.”