West Kittanning's website is back online while borough officials look for a company to maintain and manage it.
That job belonged to former Councilwoman Michelle Cogley. But when Cogley failed to win re-election, she closed the site when her term ended Dec. 31.
Cogley agreed at Tuesday's Borough Council meeting to boot the site — www.kittanningpa.com — back up for three months. Cogley built the site as a project for a web design class while studying at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and was paid $50 a month to maintain it.
“I took it down because I thought council should have control of it, and a say on what appears on the site,” Cogley said. “It shouldn't be run by someone not on council, and it wasn't in the best interest of the borough to have a non-council member run the site.”
Councilman Ken Trudgen said finding an independent company to run the site is a good way of keeping it away from politics.
“If we're going to keep the website professional and accountable, we can't jump from person to person every couple of years,” Trudgen said. “The only way around this is to contract it out to a company who can manage it forever.”
The website contains information on council meetings, trash pickup schedules and phone numbers for police and officials. Although the borough owns the website address, Cogley said the rest of the site is hers.
“I just wanted to do something nice for my community, and I maintained the ownership of that website,” Cogley said. “The borough never entered into an agreement over the ownership of that site, so the files, content and all the pictures are mine.”
Council plans to discuss the website and content ownership issue with Cogley at its April 7 meeting.
Brad Pedersen is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 724-543-1303, ext. 1337, or bpedersen@tribweb.com.
