Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Miguel Sanchez. I'm calling to order the special committee on ways and means. It is 05:39, Tuesday, May 26.
Madam clerk, can we do a roll call, please?
Vice chairman Taylor? Yep. Councilor Davidson? Here. Councilman Graves?
Here. Councilman Peterson?
We have five peasants. We have a bar.
Thank you, madam clerk. I wanna also give councilman Davidson a warm welcome. This is the first official meeting ways and meetings today. I also wanna recognize our colleague, councilman Marcus, for also joining us. Thank you.
Policy staff, clerk's office, such as loser. Thank you. At this time, I will entertain a motion to waive the readings of items one through five. Second. Motion made by councilwoman Graves, second by councilor, Jim Taylor.
At this time, I will entertain to enter exhibit 26 into the record.
Motion made by councilman Peterson, second by councilman Graves. All those in favor? Aye. Any nays? The ayes have it.
Yes. Thank you. If you plan on testifying before us, can you please stand up at this time?
no proposed changes to compensation of the board FTEs in this department. The line items in the exit budget have been broken into fixed and discretionary costs. The vast majority of these items are considered fixed and are under contract. Any necessary loss and support, which is our primary ERP software, network wiring, as well as funding for our ERP consultant, which is the amazing voice increase next year. The department has received a extremely qualified and competent consultant who is helping us draft and work through this ERP upgrade process, and this funding is necessary to keep her
the next fiscal year. Additionally, we are seeing a $1,700,000 increase in information technology, which is considered a fixed cost. This is where the court case management software fees are living, and this is what the increase is attributable to. Total supply line items are decreasing from fiscal year twenty twenty six. While we see a small increase in computer equipment, this is largely due to some equipment that is being likely to be replaced as well as the expiration of some ARPA funds we have on the stands that allowed us to scale our computer inventory, which are now in the construction of the AT and T budget.
Office supplies are being reduced by double, about $2,000, down to $10,000. This is not only mattress supplies for the IT department, but it also provides any sort of desktop user cost throughout the entire city. Stationary is check stock, task scores, and hard drive study services that are necessary in this department, and we are seeing a small decrease of $2,000 in this one item. Rent is being eliminated throughout the city budget, and as a result, this department is being reduced by $98,000. Repairs to equipment is another discretionary line item.
This is various equipment maintenance, which has been reduced by $3,500 fixed by trend. Copy and release maintenance is going up due to the new copy machine inventory they have on staff. We're seeing a modest increase in this line There item. Is a small allocation of $500 for travel. This is reimbursement for employee mileage, which I believe has come up in previous hearings.
So there are some employees in this department that are required to travel from building to building as fixed line item is telephone at $355,000. We're seeing a small savings of $57,000 since you've had a management of this contract. We're directly moving to a market sale if you
There is quite a list of contracts over
I won't read through all of
them, but we have itemized them by account holder and vendor
Thank you, Crystal. Does anyone have any questions regarding the presentation before we hear from the director? Crystal, that's such a great job as always. Thank you.
floor is yours. Or chief. Sorry. Well,
thank you for having me here. We appreciate the opportunity to talk about our department. First of all, I do wanna call your attention to the staff that we have in IT. So maybe you are familiar with the employees we have working here at City Hall as well as the staff that we have supporting all our operations based on this, both 444 Westminster Street and public safety. And it's very, very pleased with their work, very, very proud of the work that they do.
And, you know, I can't speak enough about the effort and and confidence that we have for a IT team now that's that's, you know, coming from the budget that you've supported over the years and positions that you've supported. It's really meant a lot, I think, for our operations and and support the city government operations in modernizing support and supporting the efforts of the city government throughout. Elsewhere in in the budget, you know, Crystal did a great job describing the expenses and revenues that we have. As she mentioned, the largest single line item in there is our new court case management system. We've been able to get one single case management system in place to use throughout three different courts and probate, municipal, and housing courts.
Municipal court, we're taking most of the system and doing the largest volume activity through there. So we are charged on a per case basis from municipal court. But, fortunately, that's a revenue cost control situation because we are also adding on the technology fee to tickets issued for the city. So all of the cases that come before the municipal court essentially will pay for themselves in the court case. Another major expense that we've had over the past couple of years is we over the past few years, we've started to shift some of the expenses from public safety systems and software into the city IT.
Previously, they have been in a fire line item or a police line item or a police officer. And we're continuing to to do that this year. The largest product that we've had is to generate the dispatch upgrade, which we completed in this current fiscal year. So we are now still working with Tyler, which is really the premier dispatch system in the industry. We're using their cloud hosting services.
So Tyler is hosting the platform in the system. We do have several redundant connections from our dispatch office and public safety builders to be able to reach them. And it's been working quite well for the past roughly nine months now. That's been on service. So that is a large expense that has been transferred from public safety into the city IT accounts.
Moving along in future years, we are going to continue to support Tyler, additional upgrades and support public safety services. We also have two staff now who report directly to IT supporting folks in the operation there. So we're a lot more involved in coordinating their their operations, supporting their business, and making sure that. And also, as Crystal mentioned, another large project that we have ongoing in this fiscal year, this next fiscal year and beyond is an upgrade of our ERP system. This is what we currently use in Lawson.
Watson has announced an end of life to the version that we use today. So they are no longer going to support that system after sometime around 2030. That sounds like it's a long time away. And in terms of major IT systems, it's not very far at all. So we've been working with a a contractor, and she's been doing an excellent job.
She's been there through knowledge services, Meeting with department chair in this room, meeting with all of our operational divisions, all of our financial divisions, and putting together needs analysis, gap analysis, and requirements for a new ERP system. We're currently scheduled to begin graphing the RFP this fall and releasing it later this fall into the winter so that when we come before you next year, we'll have an idea of what we're going to be looking at for replacement velocity. And that will also give us ample time to work through the contracting portion, the data migration, the service migration, retraining everybody, and upgrading our current policy environment into what it would be. So that that's a project we've been working on for this year. We'll be working on it for about half of next year,
we're really looking forward to the results because it's it's gonna have a major impact on majority of city operations that we've got to work. And then if one of the major system that we've put in place last March 11. We launched our our PPD three one one system. So that system is what I wanna know. We're continuing to support that, make up the we've worked with council members and staff as well as the mayor's office to improve some of the reporting features, improve some of the experience, some of the search capabilities within it, and some of the the case capabilities within it.
So it's easier to find the type of request that you're looking to make, easier to report a request, easier to use it on your mobile device, your phone, for example, drop a pin, find your location, looking at a pothole, and my phone knows where I'm standing so I can report while I'm sitting in real Now that system has been working very, very well for our for our city. We've tied it into PPW parks and public properties. So when a request comes in, it it belongs to one of those apartments on that and route it to them. So if they'll receive a work order, they'll complete the work, and it goes back to the constituent that their request has been completed. So we're going to continue to support that in the next year.
Other operations that we're working on, there is a minor increase in computer equipment. Over the past couple of years, we've kinda had trends of replacing hardware as needed. Two years ago, Microsoft was pending support for Windows 10, and we had a number of computers within our network that were running Windows 10 that could not be upgraded to Windows 11. This is just keeping pace with technology and staying with with mainstream operating systems. So as we migrated everything to Windows 11, we did need to purchase a good number of computers.
We replaced over 500 within the city. That was two years ago. So following that, our cost did drop last year. Next year, we are looking at some of the computers that we're able to upgrade but not replace. Those are now assigned to age out.
So we're planning to make, you know, a a somewhat significant investment next year in replacing some of our aging computer desktop hardware, desktops, laptops, and SaaS. And then our telephone services. So I think we manage cell phones for the city administration group. So that's all of the mayor's offices. That includes all of our CPW administration, many of the staff, relative directors.
We have city cell phones. We've been able to negotiate reduced costs through our AT and T contract, bringing average monthly cost per device from a little more than $40 per month down to $30 a month. And with the depending on the option that you have, now clearance rates are 30 or 35 if you have a mobile data center. So this allows staff and, for example, DIS. They have a mobile device in their car.
They bring their laptop. They can tether to the device that can work anywhere in the city from their vehicle without having to come back to the office to file file their reports, do what they need
