Providence Committee on Finance-Tuesday, May 21, 2024-5:30 PM

Good evening. My name is Helen Anthony. I'm the chair of the committee on finance. I'm calling to order our regular meeting on Tuesday, May 23 at 05:35PM. May I ask for a future please call the roll?

Carolyn Anthony? Present. Vice President, in favor?

Yeah.

Councilor Inglewood is absent. Honorable, I see a brief. Yes. Counselor Sanchez?

Here.

Fourth person, one action. You have a problem. Thank you so much. And I'd like to thank counselor Vargas for joining us. And if anyone sees any other council people, please give them over.

Doctor. For being here at our office, and who's got a wonderful clerk. Lauren and Donna. I think I also have Matt Barron, Easter Gardner, and also Jim Wells with us tonight. So thank you so much.

And with that, I would like to have a motion to read the readings of item number one through four.

So moved. You said that.

Motion made by councilor. Seconded by councilor Graves. All in favor? Aye. All opposed?

With that, I would like to invite to the table. We are gonna start with our information technology department. So if I can have him speak. Information officer Jim Silberia, if could come up, and you won't have this morning. I'm sorry.

Along with the finance team who won. Well, therapy here.

So I child care,,

she will be heading. We understand. Okay. Thank you so much.

The record.

Janice Silvaria, chief of management officer.

So I'm deputy finance director of the doctor of the company.

Alright. With that, I would like to mark as exhibit number nineteen nineteen of our Department of Information Technology budget.

May I have

the vote?

Go move. Second.

Motion made by counselor Taylor, seconded by counselor Sanchez. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Alright.

Deputy Director, would you

like to pick us up? Yes. Thank you very much, madam chair. Our format will follow the same as most other meetings. I'll read through our narrative and then move

it over to our CIO to

talk about his department briefly. Revenue in this budget is at... Is budgeted at a $160,000 for fiscal twenty five. This is an increase of a $156,400 over the fiscal twenty twenty four budget. This increase is primarily due to revenue associated with the technology fee for municipal court transactions, which is expected to be retained in the full year 2025.

Moving on to expenditures. Total salaries for fiscal twenty five is of... Proposed $1,920,485. This is an increase of $90,470 over the fiscal twenty twenty four budget. The department has proposed the following authorization changes.

They would like to fund the at an cost of $40,769. They are requesting the g fund for the director of information security, which is a savings of $131,228. They will be funding an information security project manager at cost of a $107,954 for a total net change of $17,495. Total benefits are budgeted at $4,924,072. This is a decrease of $18,221 over the fiscal twenty twenty four budget.

Total proposed services for fiscal twenty five are $3,776,624. This is an increase of $1,491,062 over the fiscal twenty twenty four budget. This increase is primarily due to additional funding for court case management software and the transfer of techno... Tyler Technology software licenses from the commissioner of public safety budget. There is also some funding available for consulting associate...

Purposes associated with the planning for the implementation of

the new ER 2%. The

total proposed budget for supplies in fiscal twenty five is $756,362. This is a decrease of a $106,600 over the fiscal twenty twenty four budget, and this decreases due to reduction in computer equipment until the related expenditures in fiscal twenty twenty five and then a new capital budget... Capital expenses in this budget. Thank you. And now, Rebecca.

Okay. And now we will turn the presentation over to you, CIO. Okay. Thank

you, and thanks for having me here. Just briefly a little about our apartments. We have seen about 19 people, and we work both as a building and get a pretty small... We manage the IT systems for all three departments. So networking, application, application, development, explore.

We assist funds with soliciting new software systems, meet their business needs. We met with a help desk group, which stands on figuring out new computers, software site move up, setting up phones for our staff as well. We manage the printing of paychecks and pay advising to the city along with the tax documents that I get now to over 10,000 employees and retirees. And we work with finance, HR, and the city to manage our VIP system. And that handles finance benefits, human resources, and all of the that we we have the.

Over the past couple of years, we've been working with several departments to consolidate contract management of our software services, and we're continuing to do that in the next fiscal year. So by bringing all these services into IT, it does have an impact on the budget, but those are offset by savings in both departments. We feel that we're better managed... Better able to manage the contracts, make sure that we... Make sure that they're renewed each year on time, make sure that they're properly funded.

We are also a little more involved in administration, posting, and management of these services while more of these applications moving to cloud services. We can better have a hands on hands on approach to making sure that the best people are in place to use the applications. Accounts are still up to date. County people still have access to the accounts and where the government has people as they leave the city and remove their assets. So all in all, it's been very successful.

It has been an increasing load and that picked up an additional Okay. Non profit over the last year to help us manage all of these software services. And we are looking forward to next year increasing a couple of other applications. We're gonna be bringing the new three one one system online in the next fiscal year. We're very excited about that.

We are going to be working with the... With three courts, the news report, court, and housing court, to bring their case management system online. And we're gonna be working with public safety on an upgrade of of one of their services where it's currently hosted to be out in the city on-site. This is a dispatch service that they use. We're gonna be migrating that to a vendor either to their cloud service.

And that's a major change for the way both safety does business as well as what the city does business with this service. We're expecting a, you know, fairly substantial increase in reliability, purchasing services that we have, less downtime, and in demand, better management where Tyler will be managing upgrades to their services, upgrades to the application. New releases are all done by them. They're not gonna have to work on to do these installations, spend the time on upgrading our hardware and database system. I know you all these things are.

It's it's a good deal of work to make this transition, but I'm not doing Tyler to, you know, make it. And, again,.

I just have a follow-up. Do you follow... Are you finished? I didn't wanna interrupt. Yes.

Okay. A few follow ups. So how is public safety... I'm sorry. Can you do a a little more of an explanation on on what exactly is happening?

I know without going on for hours, because I'm sure you could, but but what exactly is going on in public safety where the technology is going to make it more efficient? Just just a little bit of a Sure.

So today, it's it's a computer aided dispatch. Just this is what happened when you call 911. The calls are routed through the software, the the telecommunications team, their dispatchers pick up the call. They see the software. It comes up on screen or helps them View the call that's coming in.

They enter the information and helps dispatch the the closest, most appropriate, whether it's police, fire, rescue, city, and state. Okay? Today, that entire system sits on-site that we own, that we manage, that we post the application database very regularly. We need to update the entire software monthly. So each month, there's either Microsoft Windows server patches that come up that we need to apply to the servers that host the software or Tyler comes up...

Up... Updates to their software. And those need to be installed on those on those posts. When we do that, we have to take the access in the offline. Now we do formulate this with the dispatch product, and we make sure that there's no major activity other than that one.

Usually happens either Saturday mornings or Sunday mornings, but they'll be offline for a couple of hours. They'll be doing manual dispatch, and we do practice this. There's a little more pen and paper and radios to to manage dispatch service. So what we're looking to do is work with Tyler to migrate our system to their latest version. And the way Tyler manages the application will not require that downtime because they're in the better manage their updates.

They own the software, and they have redundant systems so they can update the software very quickly with no downtime. So that... That's gonna be a major improvement in service delivery and public safety. It's gonna eliminate the downtime that we have. It's also going to eliminate the number of servers, the Microsoft licenses, database licenses that we need to maintain.

To host this. It's... They're they're one of those critical systems that we've got here in the city.