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Who manages the websites of Allen County, Ohio governments — vendor audit

Captured 2026-06-05. Original records: data/documents/legal/allen-county-web-audit/ (41 sites, raw HTML + WHOIS). Structured findings: allen-county-web-vendor-audit.yaml.

Method: each entity’s homepage pulled by raw HTTP GET; the web vendor read from the footer credit (Developed by…, Website by…, Site by…), the <meta name="generator"> CMS tag, outbound vendor links, and the WordPress theme path. WHOIS captured per domain. “Credited” = the vendor names itself in-page or is linked; “inferred” = identical county template/version/registrar with no in-page credit; “platform only” = self-service builder/CMS with no human vendor named.

Headline

No single private firm runs Allen County government’s web presence — but one comes close, and it is not the one a casual look would suggest. Anne Decker Marketing, often visible on local sites, is explicitly credited on only two of the 41 entities captured: Shawnee Township and the Allen Soil & Water Conservation District (both WordPress 7.0).

The vendor that actually dominates county government is CorpComm Group, Inc. of Lima — and, most relevant to BOSC, CorpComm also builds the AEDG site (the Allen Economic Development Group, the entity steering the Google/BOSC project). So the county’s own offices and the development arm that brought the data center share one private web vendor:

This table counts developers (who built/credits the site). It is not the whole custody story: the county sites are hosted/managed by AhelioTech and edited in part in-house (county IT). See the three-layer model under “Why this matters.”

Why this matters to the records campaign

Ex. C asks for the county website CMS audit logs. “Who manages the site” turns out to have three answers, not one — and that strengthens the custody point rather than weakening it:

So a §149.43 request for CMS audit logs has named, reachable custodians: the host of record (AhelioTech) and the in-house user (b_mauk) whom the logs would name. Two facts sharpen the contradiction in the county’s item-16 answer (“the Commissioners do not manage the county website… no access”): CorpComm appears 0 times in 634 meetings while AhelioTech is named repeatedly (the county knows its host), and the county’s own IT Director is a WordPress author within the same install cluster. The public output of that install is in the corpus — data/extracted/commissioners/minutes/ — but the CMS audit trail behind it is exactly what item 16 says the county doesn’t hold. (Caveat: Mauk’s authorship is confirmed on the Auditor site, not yet on commissioners.allencountyohio.com specifically.) Full legal identities + the three-layer model: allen-county-web-vendor-corporate-records.yaml.

The one BOSC-adjacent subdivision with its own site, Shawnee Township (Shawnee II Phase 2 / sewer), is on Anne Decker — the vendor pattern is township-level, not county-wide.

Full results

County offices — all CorpComm Group, WordPress 6.9.4 on GoDaddy

allencountyohio.com (Developed by CorpComm Group, Inc.) · Engineer · Clerk of Courts (both credited + linked to corpcommgroup.com) · Commissioners, Treasurer, Prosecutor (same template/version/registrar, no in-page credit — inferred CorpComm). Sheriff sits behind Cloudflare with no credit; Board of Elections runs on the Ohio SOS statewide template (not county-procured). The whole cluster is one GoDaddy account — 160.153.0.x /24 (main .4, clerk .61, commissioners .225, auditor .236), all WordPress 6.9.4, hosted/managed by AhelioTech (per the 2023–24 minutes).

The Auditor’s site breaks the “outside vendor only” picture. allencountyohauditor.com (own domain, theme thegov, GoDaddy 160.153.0.236, no CorpComm footer credit) carries a WordPress author archive for b_mauk — “Brian Mauk – Allen County Auditor,” the county IT Director. That is direct evidence of in-house edit access to a site in the county cluster: the county is not merely a passive client of an outside firm. (Confirmed on the Auditor site; the other office archives didn’t resolve, so not yet proven for the Commissioners’ own host.) Note also classic WP author-enumeration — /author/b_mauk/ leaks the admin username even though the wp-json user list is locked (401).

Vendor of record is a dissolved corporation. Ohio SOS filings show CorpComm Group, Inc. (charter #532078; f/k/a T. R. Stuckey and Associates, Inc., renamed 1996; pres./agent Timothy R. Stuckey) filed a Certificate of Dissolution effective June 5, 2023 (resolution dated Jan 20, 2023). Yet its credit and a live link to corpcommgroup.com still appear on the county main/Recorder, Engineer, Clerk, and AEDG sites as of this audit — i.e., the county’s web presence is credited to an entity that has not legally existed for three years. This sharpens the Item-16 custody question (who holds the CMS audit logs now?). Corporate records: allen-county-web-vendor-corporate-records.yaml. Finding of fact; legal effect not asserted.

County boards / districts / authorities

• CorpComm: AEDG (aedg.org) — credited, links corpcommgroup.com
• NOW Marketing Group: ACRTA (acrta.com), Fairgrounds (allencofair.com)
• Modo Media (Wix): Board of DD (acbdd.org), Metropolitan Housing Authority (allenmha.com)
• Anne Decker: Soil & Water Conservation District (allenswcd.com)
• CivicPlus: LACRPC (lacrpc.com)
• eSchoolView: Educational Service Center (allencountyesc.org)
• Unattributed WordPress (no credit): Public Health (allencountypublichealth.org, WP 7.0), Job & Family Services (acjfs.org), Johnny Appleseed Parks (jampd.com, WP 7.0). These share the WordPress-7.0 fingerprint of the Anne Decker sites but do not credit her in-page — left unattributed rather than guessed.
• Drupal (library consortium): Lima Public Library (limalibrary.com)
• Unattributed Wix: Port Authority (allencoport.org)

Municipalities

• City of Lima — CivicPlus (limaohio.gov, .gov) + a SmartGov public portal
• Auglaize Township — Munibit (auglaizetwpallencooh.gov, .gov)
• Shawnee Township — Anne Decker Marketing
• Village of Beaverdam — Revize (government CMS)
• Village of Elida — “Site by MCG”
• American Township — Wix, built by students (“created by the students of…”)
• Village of Bluffton — Duda platform, “Site by:” unresolved
• Village of Spencerville — legacy Xara static site
• Village of Cairo — unattributed WordPress 7.0
• City of Delphos — blocked the audit client (HTTP 403); platform undetermined

School districts

Finalsite: Allen East, Delphos City, Elida Local, Spencerville Local · Edlio: Perry Local · eSchoolView: ESC · Wix: Lima City Schools · NOW Marketing: Apollo Career Center · Undetermined (JS-rendered): Shawnee Local (limashawnee.com), Bath Local (bathwildcats.org)

No official website

• Townships: Amanda, Jackson, Marion, Monroe, Richland, Spencer, Sugar Creek (contact via county only)
• Villages: Harrod (Facebook only), Lafayette (placeholder)
• Fort Shawnee — residents voted to disincorporate in 2012; no municipal government or site

Caveats

• Reflects sites as served on 2026-06-05; the WHOIS creation date is the domain’s, not the current build.
• “Inferred CorpComm” on the four county subdomains rests on an identical WordPress-6.9.4 / GoDaddy / shared-template signature, not an in-page credit — strong but not a self-attribution. If you need it courtroom-solid, the proof is a single view-source on each footer (or the county’s web-services contract).
• Three sites were bot-blocked or JS-rendered at capture (Delphos, Shawnee/Bath schools) and are marked undetermined rather than guessed.

Sources for entity rosters and URLs: Allen County Commissioners/Treasurer directories, LACRPC, and per-entity searches; full citations are in the capture log. Vendor attributions are first-party (the sites’ own footers/links), saved under the records folder above.