Special to The Times
The Jefferson County Commission has launched a new website at the same domain name JCCAL.org to serve citizens better and improve accessibility. The County started this project in the Fall of 2025 after evaluating several vendors and selecting Civic Plus, an industry leader in government websites.
Benefits citizens will notice immediately:
- Streamlined navigation and visually cleaner pages in a fresh color palette.
- A consistent, mobile-first design, making it easier for residents to navigate services on their phones or tablets.
- More direct links to tools citizens need most, such as tag renewals, permitting, Commission meeting calendars, agendas, and the livestream of meetings.
- The ability to fill in needed forms online without having to download and email them back.
- The ability to sign up for the notices citizens want to receive, such as Household Hazardous Waste and Electronic/Paper shredding events, upcoming bids, and job openings.
- Meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, helping Jefferson County stay compliant and ensuring equitable access to public information.
- Public PDFs are now automatically converted into ADA‑aligned HTML transcripts, making County documents easier to access on any device.
- Older PDFs become accessible, too, allowing us to bring years of archived public documents up to modern standards without delays.
Features that didn’t change:
- Our “Ask JeffCo” chat tool is available 24/7 to help answer questions and link citizens to the resources they need.
- Livestreaming of County Commission and Planning and Zoning meetings, which now have closed captioning.
“Websites are always a work in process,” said Director of Public Information Helen Hays, APR. “But this new site, combined with the Civic Plus platform, will provide greater capabilities for our departments to improve online access for our citizens. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to do your business online.”
Jefferson County Information Technology Services Group led the new website effort and worked with every single County Department. The redo also includes a new Intranet for employees. In total, over 900 pages had to be reviewed/touched during this process.
“Continually looking for ways to improve our technology so that we can serve citizens more efficiently, and put information at their fingertips, is a part of our daily mission,” added Sri Karra, Chief Information Officer. “This is just the beginning; we hope to continually work to improve it and provide even more convenience in the near future.”
