Bennington website ‘upgrades’
cost taxpayers hundreds of dollars
BENNINGTON -- Sloppy “upgrades” to the Town website have cost taxpayers $520. Back in June, Jonah Spivak of Spectrum Design in Bennington submitted a proposal to the head of community development to clean up benningtonvt.org with a special emphasis on adding clickable buttons to the homepage while performing other maintenance tasks around the site. benningtonvt.org is where you learn about Bennington i.e. Select Board agendas and minutes and policies, or where to vote, or business resources, etc etc. One of the links on the homepage is Community Resources and the drop-down menu takes you to a community video page featuring several minute-long clips from 2013 geared for marketing purposes in a folksy way. The content in most of these clips raises red flags that Spectrum should have detected.
Bennington’s business climate has changed quite a bit since footage was shot for the video in 2013. Buttons of businesses long gone (such as Star Electric) wrap around a video player while the still photo below shows the Bennington Arts Guild, which moved locations before closing its doors forever in 2015. South Street Cafe left its location after 25 years and was absorbed by another business in the summer of 2019.
But this is where things get silly. Since when does the Bennington Rec Center have an indoor hoops court?
The minute-long intro with Town Manager Stu Hurd is fine yet it’s 6 years old and ought to be re-shot. But it’s embarrassing that visitors to Bennington’s website are watching videos of “Bennington” that show images of shuttered businesses as well as visuals from communities some 1,600 miles away. Indeed, much of the content is out of date or has nothing to do with Bennington. In essence we have for 6 years been marketing other towns and while paying a local vendor several hundred bucks to ignore the red flags and keep the videos on the website.
CGI also said they spoke with Stu in February of 2019 and he told the regional rep that he was “happy” with the video. That’s the biggest red flag of them all and one we paid a favored vendor $520 to ignore during the so-called upgrades.
Stu was alerted to the error-riddled videos before he paid Spectrum for services rendered. He said he would have staff take a gander but that didn’t happen as the warrants for the September 23 Select Board meeting show a $520 payment to Spectrum Design.
Bennington taxpayers are apathetic to act on wasteful spending. Sadly, it seems, the Select Board won’t do anything to remedy Spectrum’s poor effort.
