They should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org." The plan would have bee

They should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org." The plan would have been to change this later to read md.gov/starspangled200, which will 301 redirect to maryland.gov/starspangled200, which needs to be made to point to a new starspangled200.maryland.gov subdomain because the Windows server running www.maryland.gov requires everything to be under the www.maryland.gov/Pages/<page name>.aspx URL scheme... But project management ran over budget, and the people who needed to be contacted about those changes couldn't be reached, and when the subcontractor's project manager talked to the vendor's project manager who emailed the wrong government IT department, some information was lost. The necessary forms needed to be filed, but to do so the contractor needed a particular vendor ID number and approval for that takes months, how many more projects do you plan to do for the state? And anyways starspangled200.com looks pretty clean, do we really want to do this optional redirect? So they spent some pocket change and registered it for 10 years, and handed off the task of renewing it to some administrator who could spell DNS but knew nothing else about it with a stern warning that things would break if it was not renewed. Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge of this project.