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LGS Acquires all Assets of Hill County Software and Support, Inc.

PRESS RELEASE

Contact Information:
Local Government Solutions, L.P.
William E. Hazeldean
ehazeldean@us-lgs.com

LGS Acquires all Assets of Hill County Software and Support, Inc.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

{Houston, TX, November 14, 2016} – Representatives of Local Government Solutions (LGS) and Hill County Software and Support, Inc. (HCSS) announced today that they have reached a definitive agreement in which LGS will acquire all of the assets of HCSS effective December 1, 2016. Ed Hazeldean will remain the President of LGS while Elisabeth Gardner, President of HCSS will become the Director, Justice Court Solutions within LGS reporting to Sandy Randall, VP of Operations. Jim Stateczny, HCSS Chairman will resign his position as Chairman of the Board of HCSS but is being retained in a consultancy role to manage the accounting segment of the LGS-HCSS business for an extended period during the transition. Will Stateczny, HCSS, Vice President of R&D will assume a new position as Director of R&D at LGS-HCSS, a new division of LGS and will report to Mr. Hazeldean. The LGS-HCSS division will be located in the former HCSS Office complex in Boerne, Texas.

In a brief statement following the announcement, LGS President, Ed Hazeldean commented saying, “There are few times when two competing companies come together with so many complementary attributes. Early on in our discussions it was clear there was a unique synergy among our companies which could only result in enhancing both companies customer value.” Since its beginning in 1982 HCSS has focused on providing quality software products and support for the local government market. “HCSS and LGS have a very complementary suite of software and services all centrally focused around their customer needs and requirements”, stated Jim Stateczny, Chairman of the Board of HCSS. “Out of all of the software companies serving local government market, LGS is the only company I would consider entrusting our customers to”.

LGS is one of seven affiliated companies of Information Capital Enterprises, Inc. whose business focus is on building, delivering, and supporting business critical software and services for local government entities. Information Capital companies serve at least one segment of all 254 counties in Texas and has in recent years expanded it business to other U.S. States.

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Don’t Upgrade to Windows 10 Yet

With the new release of the Windows 10 operating system, some of you may be anxious to install the new system on your computers. We ask that you please hold off on that for now because HCSS does not fully support Windows 10 or the Edge browser. We do currently and will continue to support current versions of Windows and Internet Explorer.

The HCSS solutions integrate software products from multiple vendors. When Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, we work with those vendors to use versions of their software tested on the new version, and then we also test our application on the new version. While we try to do much of this testing using Microsoft’s so-called early release candidates, there is almost always a few weeks of testing that must occur after the official Microsoft release.

In the case of Windows 10, Microsoft is also introducing a new browser, named Edge. Since HCSS solutions are browser based, and have always specified Internet Explorer, we anticipate additional time until we can support Edge. However, Microsoft continues to support Internet Explorer, which HCSS will continue to specify and support until we are certain of reliable results using Edge.

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County & District Clerks… OCA is ready for your reports!

In a letter dated May 6th, 2011, The Office of Court Administration notified its courts that it was finally ready to accept the new monthly reports. OCA will start accepting their new monthly reports on Thursday, May 12th, 2011.

As a recap, OCA adopted new rules for reporting that were to take affect September 1, 2010. Unfortunately they were not completely ready to accept those new reports.

HCSS has had the new reporting requirements in place since September of last year, so the submission of your new reports should go smoothly. Remember that unless OCA grants a waiver for good cause, the clerk must submit the reports by electronic means —by entering or uploading the data directly into the Court Activity Reporting and Directory System. Since they haven’t been accepting reports since September of last year, each court will have to submit their reports for the past 9 months. OCA also requires each report be submitted in order, starting with September 2010.

OCA has made several changes to dispositions and sentencing information and IADT accurately tracks the status of all of the cases and their Active or Inactive status as required. There were also changes to offense classifications that added several new categories. Those categories have been in IADT since September so if you haven’t already made those changes to your offense codes, you will need to adjust those categories in order to get a correct OCA report. While making these changes is necessary, we’ve made the process very quick and simple.

When  you’re working on your reports, make sure that you have the latest update installed on your system. If you have any questions on how those requirements are handled in IADT, please call our tech support line at 1-800-422-1982. You can also find some help in our new online help system HERE.