Meet Chad. Chad is fictional: a helpful colleague in a story about a familiar website bottleneck. In this story, Chad is the one person every municipal website maintenance request lands on. Every holiday-hours update, every pool-schedule change, every "quick typo on the homepage" — it all funnels, politely and without anyone ever deciding it should, straight to Chad's desk.
Every City Has a Chad
Every city has a Chad. He's the one who knows where the login lives. And the password hints. And which page breaks if you sneeze near it. When the events calendar misbehaves, Chad knows the twelve-step workaround, and that workaround exists nowhere on earth except inside Chad's head.
All Chads are diligent, kind, and quietly a hero. When someone needs the holiday closure hours posted by Friday, Chad posts them. When the parks page needs new photos, Chad uploads them. Somewhere along the way, "ask Chad" stopped being a habit and became the process. Not the official process — the real one.
Then, one summer, Chad takes a well-earned vacation. Two weeks, lake-adjacent, phone in a drawer. And the website quietly takes a vacation too. Nobody planned it that way. It happened one helpful favor at a time.
How Everything Ended Up on One Desk
Here's the part worth saying out loud: nobody chooses this. No city manager wakes up and declares, "Let's make one person the entire publishing pipeline for all city website updates." The bottleneck builds itself out of reasonable parts.
It usually starts with old tooling. The website went live years ago, set up by a person who has since moved on (possibly to a warmer climate), and the admin side has become the digital equivalent of a drawer that only opens if you lift it slightly. Making a change requires tribal knowledge. Tribal knowledge, in many municipalities, lives in exactly one head.
Then everyday habits finish the job. It's faster to email Chad than to learn a cranky CMS, so people email Chad. And it works! The update happens! Every successful "hey Chad, when you get a sec" quietly reinforces the pattern, until the pattern is policy and nobody remembers agreeing to it.
Here's the thing: the problem was never Chad. The problem is that everything depends on Chad. He's good at his job, and that's exactly the trap. Competence, applied generously and documented never, slowly turns into infrastructure.
What the Bottleneck Quietly Costs
The costs are easy to miss because they're mostly quiet. Nothing catches fire. Things just become slightly wrong, slightly late, or slightly stale — a slow fade rather than a headline.
Consider the classics, in no particular order:
- The holiday hours page that cheerfully says "Open today" while the entire building enjoys a long weekend — and residents arrive at locked doors holding library books.
- The event page that outlives its event by three months, enthusiastically promoting a summer concert series during the first snowfall.
- The update that sits in one inbox for a week and a half because the requester assumed someone else was handling it. Someone else was Chad. Chad was at the lake, being refreshingly offline.
None of these are scandals. They're small dents in trust, but residents notice dents. If the hours are wrong once, next time people call instead of checking. If the events are stale twice, they stop checking at all — and the website quietly becomes the least-trusted brochure in town.
Underneath the annoyances sits the bigger one: a single point of failure. When one desk is the only path to publish, every city website update moves at the speed of one calendar — sick days, training days, Tuesdays included. Even when everything's fine, the queue exists. The queue has a name, and the name is "out of office."
Municipal Website Maintenance That Doesn't Route Through One Desk
The fix isn't a stern memo instructing everyone to be less dependent on Chad. Habits don't respond to memos. The fix is changing the setup, so the bottleneck can't quietly rebuild itself the following Tuesday.
That starts with shared publishing workflows. More than one person can edit safely: the clerk posts the holiday hours, the communications coordinator publishes the news item, the recreation department updates its own schedules — and sensible permissions keep everyone in their lane without funneling everything through one desk. City website updates stop queuing behind a single person because there isn't a single person anymore. There's a team, with guardrails.
Next comes tooling that doesn't require tribal knowledge. If posting an event takes a twelve-step workaround, that's the tool's fault, not the staff's. Good municipal website maintenance should feel like using a phone, not like defusing one. When the system is easy, "only Chad knows" stops being true, because now everyone knows.
And then there's enquiry routing. When every resident question funnels into one inbox, that inbox becomes a second Chad — smaller, but just as load-bearing. Routing enquiries to the right department automatically means nothing ferments in a single queue, and residents hear back from the people who actually know the answer.
If you're curious what this looks like in practice, we go deeper on the workflow side of a city website — same philosophy, fewer lake metaphors.
The Better Week Nobody Notices
Here's the good version of the story. The holiday hours go up on time because the clerk posted them — no favor required, no queue consulted. The summer concert page comes down in September because retiring it takes one click instead of one hero. Resident enquiries land in the right inboxes across departments, so nothing piles up behind a single person's lunch break.
And Chad? Chad still does meaningful work — the fun kind, the projects kind. But Chad also takes his vacation, and this time the website doesn't even notice he's gone. Nobody emails him a single "when you get a sec." The lake remains undefeated.
A good website week is when nobody notices the website — and Chad finally notices his inbox is quiet.
If any of this sounds familiar — if your city has a Chad, or if you are the Chad — it's fixable, and it's more fixable than it feels from inside the queue. Take a look at how we approach city websites, or get in touch with us and tell us about your queue. We love these stories. We especially love the endings where everyone gets their vacation.