Anna Skinner reports:
After nearly a year of litigation between Westfield Mayor Andy Cook and Clerk-Treasurer Cindy Gossard, the Westfield City Council asked the city’s Director of Informatics, Chris Larsen, to remove the BeyondTrust software from the clerk-treasurer’s office computers during a June 13 council meeting.
The meeting included public discussion between council members, Larsen and attorneys for Cook and Gossard.
Lawsuits were filed by Cook after he ordered an audit of the city’s accounts in August 2020, and Gossard failed to provide the correct information to the appointees conducting the investigation. Several months later, Gossard accused the city’s administration of installing “spyware” on all six computers in the clerk-treasurer’s office and accessing the data without her permission. The software, BeyondTrust, provides remote access for the city’s IT department to handle computer issues. Two lawsuits are ongoing — one is the city against Gossard and one is Gossard against Cook.
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