Information Technology Advisory Committee - Regular Meeting

I actually

remember this.

Hi. It's 06:00. It is 06:00. Okay. I would like to call the Wednesday, September 3 meeting of the IT board to order. We are missing two members of the board, Bob Rutgers and Ryan Corcoran. Ryan did call in and said that he would not be available tonight. Bob may be along shortly, but we do have a quorum. All other members are present. And so we will proceed with the meeting. Item two on our agenda is the pledge allegiance. Flag is off to our left. My left. Pledge allegiance to the flag of

The United States Of America and to the

republic for which it stands,

one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Item three on our agenda is public comment. Mostly staff and alders and board members here. Anybody have a comment? I'll introduce myself. I'm Joe Paper. I'm one of the Alderman. I chair the Finance Committee. So thanks for having me. Sure. Thanks, Joe. And let the record reflect that Mr. Bridgers has joined us. That takes us to item four, which is approval of minutes. Our last meeting from was in June. We have the meeting minutes from the June meeting.

Were there any changes or corrections needed to that Those minutes? I'm seeing a lot of head shakes. Any objection to approving those by unanimous consent tonight? Hearing no objection, we'll consider those approved by unanimous consent, Chris. And that takes us to item five which is our business items tonight. We have two specific items and the first one, ID25DashO2063, Review and act on an agreement between EPR fireworks and the city. Chris, did you wanna start or you wanna turn it right over to the fire department staff?

Sure. I'll I'll start because there's a little bit of technology stuff that I just wanna go over with everyone. And then I'll hand it over to chief Goplin, and he'll take the operational side of things or him and assistant chief Fleming will. So first of all, fireworks is, it's a suite of applications for the fire department. It's a records management systems, electronic patient care records, and a bunch of other stuff that they'll get into.

One of the things I wanna say about EPR, and we had gone out for an RFP over a year ago for one of these systems. And EPR was second in the in the running, and now we're back here to move to go with them. But one of the, things that I really liked about EPR, and I included this in their in your packet, is their focus on security. This is stuff I didn't have to ask for, which is generally every vendor, you have to ask them, what are you doing? How are you doing it?

And so, they sent me this 20 page, document on how on what they do with security and that sort of thing. So I thought this is this is really nice that the company is actually being proactive with that and, like, getting out in front. Here's what we're doing. One of the things they did do is they did fill out our vendor questionnaire, which is attached, and you can see it's a, you know, cloud based application. They're meeting all the all the different security stuff that we wanna see, the SOC two certification, NIST compliance, HIPAA compliance, and and even ISO compliance.

So we got a couple different ISO certs there. And, and then just all the dependencies, that they're looking for. Web based application, so they they support any browser. And, and then for user account control, at least for identity access management, they do use SAML. And so our Entre ID or what's formerly Azure AD, they'll use for for single sign on.

And so those are just a couple of things I wanted to highlight about about the company and their technical requirements, our technical requirements and how they're how they're meeting them and that sort of thing. So for now, I will turn it over to chief.

Alright. Thanks. I appreciate your oh, I'm sorry. Yeah.

I just record retention is at seven years.

Yes. Okay. Yeah. It was six years by default, and so we do have seven in the contract. Thanks.

I appreciate the opportunity to to talk with you a little bit about this program tonight. Just real quickly, we found some implementation problems going forward with the previous software. And ultimately, as we look through more of the modules through that implementation process, we found additional issues that ultimately just proved that it does not meet our needs. EPR Fireworks is a very close second in the scoring process for the two software platforms that were evaluated at the end of the process last year. One of the things that I wanted to mention really quickly is I am familiar with the program and I'm familiar with this company's customer service.

And I think it speaks to what Chris was saying with some of the things they provided without even being really asked to do that, they are very, very responsive and ready and able to adjust to whatever needs a department has, which I truly appreciate from the vendor. So the other thing that I would mention is it does have a mobile integrated healthcare component reporting tool in it that the other platform did not have. That's one of the programs that we're really focusing on in the department and I think that's going to be an important addition to this project. I have asked Assistant Chief Tim Fleming to marshal this project through. So I'm going to let him go into the rest of a brief explanation on that request.

Perfect. Thanks. Two fun. As I said earlier, I'll cheer for the CAD meetings. So appreciate you guys' time again here.

And as they both alluded to, we've had about eight months or so to really start to walk through first do it, what that implementation project works with. And we started with our RMS and our Fire Prevention Bureau and started to walk through that inspection process, records management and data migration. I ran into a few hiccups initially that the Bureau was reporting back and walked through those with any integration, we expect to have a few hiccups. But when we started to assess the other pieces of it from scheduling, the EMS reporting, to our fire reporting through NIFRS and then the other options that we have. And the goal of first due and the purchase price that we had associated with that was to be a fully encompassing product, meaning all of our basically our reporting duties, our asset management, our training records, all of those things all the way into including scheduling and preplans, we're going to be encompassed in there.

And that initial cost or annual cost rather was just over $66,000 When we looked at that and still have the goal to move this back to, I don't want to say eliminating software, but certainly narrowing down the number of software programs we have in cooperation with IT and then having that fiscal responsibility piece to it. When we started to look at all the issues that we began to identify, because we use each of the solutions at first due with the price and the lack of performance that we're getting, we we started looking at other alternative options. So that's where we came to to EPR fireworks. A number of our neighbors in our community are are or in our county rather are using this. We're able to tour a number of departments or a handful of departments, I should say, and go from user, end user all the way through staff.

And there's two sides to these programs, right? It's the end user using it, creating the reporting, doing the work, but then the alternative side of pulling that data back out and truly analyzing what we're doing and assuring that we have quality and quality management both in place. That's where we started to see really the benefits of Fireworks compared to FirstDew and some of the shortcomings that we identified. So we are able to move everything over to Fireworks with this proposal with the exception of APX preplans and vector scheduling, which comes from target solutions. When we look at the numbers on that and where we're at for 2025 are projected to be, we were at $71,750 with our plan moving forward with the introduction of EPR fireworks, maintaining APX pre plans, and then still maintaining Vector Pro scheduling, we're at 58,004 and 88.

So we're showing about $12,000 in savings there. It's 13 ish. You want the hard math, it's $13,260. So I believe that's printed on the agenda for today as well. Hard numbers back and forth. There's a greater savings if we wanted to truly use EPR Fireworks in its full suite, but we're still in that best of breed analysis or decision making here. And to be honest with you, the pro scheduling from Fireworks was not where we wanted it. In fact, it's fantastic. And they have an interface with Fireworks, it'll drop that data in for us, which we currently don't have with the first UI either. So we took a hard look at this.

We are very confident that this is the right selection. We certainly did anticipate this with the first due purchase when we came here roughly a year ago, But this is the point of bless you. We definitely need to make a decision. As the chief alluded to, we need to be up and running and operational for January 1. So all of our data for the calendar year is pulling from one place. So that's why we are scrambling a bit to assure that we got it on your agenda tonight and be able to move this forward through council approval and truly have a what we believe to be the best product in place here for 2026.

I'll just add to the scheduling side. Fireworks, EPR Fireworks scheduling software is really only a few years old and I do expect that it will improve dramatically as time goes on. And that's something we will keep our eye on to potentially be able to result in some more cost savings down the road along with the pre planned side of things. I can't commit to additional cost savings down the road, but I certainly think there is a possibility.

Certainly. And thank you. As we look at additional items that we are maintaining additional products that we have, some of the pieces that we're not renewing and then some of the things that we are. Operative IQ is where our narcotics management system is in inventory. We're confident that in working with fireworks that that'll be another piece that we can migrate over without that will bring us more cost savings as well.

So that's about a $3,600 a year product that we have outside of fireworks now. And as we continue to manage it and obviously, the DEA compliance is a big deal. So we wanna get in and get operational and then continue to look for additional options for cost savings with them. But learning what we've learned in the last eight months, I I want to have a strategic approach of where we're moving with this, so we don't duplicate work at third time. Is there any specific questions I can answer?

Just first support, yearly support. We know what percentage of the cost of the product itself is used for ongoing support?

I don't know that I have the updated quote broke down.

Yeah. The updated yeah. What the percentage is? There's a I'll just say there's a less than 8,000 implementation fee. And then moving forward, there's a there's an annual fee for everything that they're all the different modules that they're going to be using, and that's at the tail end of the master service agreement. So let me see if I

got that open real quick.

So this is how the cost structure is broke down. So each one of these line items are, well, not each one, but most of these line items are the different, applications within the suite that they'll be using, and and that's how it's how it's broken down. Yeah. I'll just say one of the things, when we look at this contract, it is a sixty month, term, and, annual increase year over year is only 1.5%. So we were able to negotiate that in, and then the ability to, renegotiate, year over year after after sixty months.

That's because it's a Florida company and they pay less down there.

Right. That's right. So

but those are some of the things that, you know, when we're looking at the overall financial picture of the city, those are some of the things we're starting to do is go back to current vendors and try and renegotiate better year over year increases. So on the front end of a contract to and it was they didn't even bat an eye at it. Said, I hey. I'd like to lock this thing in for sixty months and get down there around 1.5. And they said, yeah. That sounds good.

That's real unusual, actually.

It is. That's a good rate.

I think it also speaks to this this company and understanding, you know, who they're serving and and they're not out to, you know, really rake anybody over the coals. Reputation is outstanding and I think it shows in our interactions with them so far.

I like the fact too that we use it county wide, different, departments.

Yep. It's good.

Other questions, comments, concerns? Joe? Sure. Sean, thank you.

Yeah. Out of

curiosity, there is a convention that has some kind of integration with EHR. EHR, electronic health records. Some kind of

Oh, it's electronic EPCRs, electronic patient care reports. And that's the report that when the ambulance crew goes out to the patient's home, they fill out the patient care report and then the hospital gets a copy of that. It ultimately comes part of that complete record that goes along with that patient.

Okay, so that report is submitted to the hospital that the patient is being transported to?

Correct, it's, yes, it's transferred to the hospital, yes.

So there's two pieces to it. The new life packs that we have in the technology and the 30 fives, it actually transmits the data that we that's collected from the patient through there over, and then that record comes back to the PCR as well. And then we complete it and that becomes a permanent part of their medical record as we transfer care.

Now, do you know if the hospital email or you're doing it with some kind of back end EPI link?

They can send it various ways. I mean, it really depends on the hospital and some hospitals want it via email, some of them have a system set up to receive it through, you know, like an API or some other process. But ultimately, this company can determine how that works with each hospital, which I'm pretty sure is probably going to be a very standard format, and and they'll be able to show each other.

Standard. Yeah. I've got a background up here. Yep. So most of the hospitals around here, I think, is Epic. Yep. And Epic is very integratable. I'm not sure about Aurora. I'm not sure about the other.

And I I can tell you that in my previous job, we used this platform and it was no problem sending reports to Aurora, the Prevea healthcare system, all of the major systems that we worked with. It was able to do that, no problem.

Yeah. And the other departments in the county are going to those exact same hospitals too. Yeah, figured. Chief,

do we have a GIS data point for each resident in the city? So I I think you alluded that whoever the family was, they paid filled out a paper form. Yeah? Or is it on the No.

An form on the tablet and yes, there's a GIS. The the letlong are associated with the address through the the city's CADs or the city's GIS systems. It all feeds into this platform and the CAD system.

Is it is it real abbreviated by the time you get to that residence or or company as far as most of it's already filled out and they just have to plug in a couple. Yeah.

It pulls in all the call information. So like the information, the address, the incident type, all that. You still have to put people's names in and so on. Yeah. But there's a logic built into the system too so that when you, if you tap on, we did it's this type of call, like a cardiac arrest call.

It will bring up certain screens that you have to fill out in an abbreviated manner, so to speak. Kind of a quick key setup so that it's right there in front of you and you can quickly navigate through that in the incident. Plus, it'll remember the patients and it'll recall the address. So if you verify that you're at the same address you were at a month ago, that patient will come up and and if it's the same patient, you can just reinsert the information.

Thank you.

Yeah. I I have two. The first one is, is it entirely cloud based other than the app you mentioned initially, the mobile piece? Yes. And there's that there's nothing else on-site that you're responsible for other than end user? It's connectivity.

And, you know, like, in their, ambulances, they have, cradle points that are, cellular connected. K. No.

The other thing is, have they had any reported breaches or anything like that? Any data issues or security issues that you're aware of?

Not that I'm aware of.

K. Yeah. Their security posture is pretty robust, and and it's pretty impressive. The only thing that I didn't see in here is how they report it. They really I didn't see anything about that and and, like, how they report to you, if there's an issue or, you know, any sort of mandatory reporting. But outside of that, it's

I thought I had I've been in a lot of different contracts, actually. But I thought I had breach report in here. And You might have, and

I may have missed it, but just out of curiosity.

I'll look around in there, but I'm I'm pretty sure I have breach report in there.

K.

That's all. Thank you. And then and, of course, this contract was vetted by the city attorney. Actually and his first look, apart from reformatting it into a format that he liked, all the language, he liked right off the bat. The only thing that we had to change was where we go to court if we have to go to court, which is standard. We always bring it to Waukesha County. But other than that, that's something we have to change in every contract we we do. That was the only thing that he needed changed. And so it was a good he in his opinion, it was a good contract. Okay. You don't always get from him.

So we don't have to put any contingencies on it. He's reviewed it and approved it. Correct.

Yes. Yep. That was the that was the other thing. Some of the we're starting to get up a timeline on getting EPRs approval on our red lines. And so Brian was, yep, just put it on there with the contingency. And but we got the final contract back. So we don't need any contingencies. We can just the board can move forward with it.

Do have a question?

No. You guys are doing great. Anybody else?

Retain a motion.

Are we approving the

six years

or just this year? Because I you only saw the budget for this year.

It's it's Five years

is right.

Sorry. Yeah. We're just approving the contract and

The contract

is presented. So Yeah. As presented.

It'll automatically renew unless we for for that five year period Yes. By year.

Yep. Okay.

So, yeah, motion to approve the

budget for for

the Contractors EMS. Okay.

I'll second.

Okay. Motion by Fabian. Seconded by Hanson. Any other questions or comments before we vote?

Are you ready, Chris? Sure. I'll just go down the line. You wanna you wanna roll call it? Yeah. Paul Fabian? Yep. Bob Bruters?

Yes.

John Hanson? Yep. Brandon Costoni? Yes. Ryan Ryan Zapson? Daniel Mannion? Yes. And Steve Van Trieste? Yes.

That did pass unanimously, six to zero.

Thank you very

much. Appreciate time. For coming in and presenting.

Thank you.

Thank you

guys a bunch.

Appreciate your

time. Good good luck. I know it's we're up against it time line wise. We are, but

I'm confident we'll be able to do it. So thank you very much again.

Thanks for coming. Have

a good day.

That takes us to Item 5B, ID 20 Five-twenty89, which is a review and discussion of our 20 '26, IT related CIP items. I'll turn it over to Chris.

Yeah. So, there's nothing really major in in this CIP budget. It's mostly replacement schedule type stuff. Even some of the AV stuff, which Andrew's here to talk

about the

AV. He's he's in that communications group that handles all the audio video stuff. He's also our UI UX guy for the website. So he he does all the website stuff and also works with all the social media on that team. So I'm gonna bring Andrew up first. So if you have any questions around stuff that the AV folks have going on, you can ask him, and then we can move on to the IT more IT related stuff.

So we're looking at the AV equipment

line item? That's the one.

Okay. Andrew, go ahead. Yep. So just

kinda basic overview for it. It's not too too dissimilar from previous years. One of the things that we're we're really trying to strive on is making it so that all buildings within city are well, all all buildings within the city are underneath this kind of umbrella of repairs. So if police or fire have a repair that needs to be done, that this is covered under this portion of the budget. I think that's why the I believe the the maintenance and replacement budget might be slightly higher in addition to the equipment upgrades.

So right right now, like, example, PD's got a project that's open, and we've got our our AV vendor going out there to to fix a problem that they're having with a Crestron's product. We did our first level troubleshooting, couldn't figure out what was going out with it, so we escalated it out to our our vendor that way. In the past, they may have been calling SKC who installed everything for it while we're using AVI Forte. They just changed their name over Forte this year. I'm just trying to get everyone on the same page, make sure that we're trying to establish kind of uniform installations, what's being installed, how it's being installed, what brands are preferred brands, and then setting those baselines for how long these products should last for and creating a replacement schedule off that.

So that's kind of reflected here in our our five year CIP request here. We still have Granicus and Coners in here kind of as a a placeholder. In case one of them fails, we wanna be able to buy the new one, replace it as as need be. Something that is different is we only have two of them on the schedule. We are recommending that the water utility not install a new encoder when they move over to their new building as they're the only ones who are utilizing that meeting room.

And we do have a handful of meetings that meet without being broadcast out there. It is a nice to have, not a legal requirements to broadcast them out. And since most of the time, they don't broadcast a video other than just their attachments on their resume the agendas. We're recommending not installing a $6,000 encoder for a once a month meeting. Beyond that, you might see that there are AV upgrades for the council chambers, training rooms, and city hall in general, which could be a little concerning since we are in a relatively new city hall.

These are not so much that we need to upgrade some of the equipment in in there. But for the council chamber, if we upgrade some of the monitors, we need to upgrade all the monitors due to regulations since it is a municipal court as well. So if we upgrade one touchscreen or one touchscreen goes out, we have to replace all the touchscreens in there. So you're getting a uniform a uniform experience that there's no technology biases, basically, that point. For the council chambers, if we were doing anything, it'd be mostly programming upgrades to make ease of ease of life kind of thing.

Setting it up where the cameras can automatically track who's talking. We've got some actually really neat AI driven programming right now where you can even have it find where a person's sitting, recognize a photo of them, and bring up a lower third that actually says who they are, where their district is from, things like that, that's kind of information.

Little little big brother, admittedly, Scary.

It's it's it's more and more becoming a reality with that.

But the but that but that lower third stuff would be nice. We used to have that. Yeah. Where, you know, the lower third is like that's the old the graphic overlay on the bottom, who's talking or who they are and that sort of thing. And, you know, years ago, we had that when we were still broadcasting on You know, we had one to two people working night meetings, you know, a night.

Mhmm. So we had a full production. And but we're missing that now. And so, like, when when Alderman Manning here is speaking, you know, you might be able to see his name tag, but to be able to overlay that and, you know, see what district he represents and all that other stuff or who the special guest is, all that stuff. It's it's good stuff.

Yeah. That's one of things we're working on. He's trying to figure out how we can get less shiny and heme tags too because that's one of the flaws we discovered with the the lovely lighting in in council chambers. The silver doesn't like love it that well. That's not out of this budget.

Training room upgrades. So this room in here, the most of the EOC portions of it are pretty stable. I mean, TVs that are on the walls that aren't being used for the presentations that you're seeing up on the screen now, They've got thousands of hours left because they aren't utilized as as frequently. But these two large displays up here up front are I think they're 106, 107 inch displays that are used quite often, quite frequently, turning on and off quite a bit. So we're expecting that by 2029 that they'll be in need of repair.

And by then, the cameras will also have been roughly at that ten year mark of of being installed, so due for upgrades and installations of that that quality. This room is a little bit less complex. Therefore, having a smaller budget is there as well. And then for our 2,030, that budget is including our conference rooms that are utilized quite often. We kind of space those out where we would start with our larger conference rooms of Room 301 And 201, especially with 201 And 162 since those are publicly accessible rooms as well.

So they are getting used decently often, especially 301 And 201, they're used daily by staff for day to day operations. 162 is used a little less often, but it is a a good mix of of staff and public usage for it. Finally, the last items on there are the downtown kiosk and the BrightSign unit replacements. So the city currently has about 17 to 20 BrightSign units. So these are basically mini display devices that can feed an HDMI signal into a TV and present content remotely.

So inside the in the lobby here, have two of them, one that displays the agendas, one that displays advertising. We're seeing more and more residents are interacting with them in the fact that we've got QR codes up on them, and we're able to track those. And we're getting decent not a not a ton of of views from it, but we're getting decent, you know, follow through of something scanning a link and figuring out what's going on with an event. Park and Rec also utilizes them for advertisers in at the their event spaces and for a few of their buildings as well. And they're looking to expand that as well.

They seem to last a decent amount of time, so depending if they're indoor or outdoor, they tend to degrade a little bit quicker outdoors, but most of them are in indoors indoor locations. And then for the kiosks, since they are twenty four seven displays, we expect that in that five to seven year range, that's when they'll start to lose the backlight, lose some sort of quality to them. And to replace them, you'd would need another outdoor twenty four seven display as well, which, of course, is not a the most affordable option, but we're getting, again, decent feedback from mostly nonresidents. Residents don't love them because they're like, we know our town, we know it's there. But we're getting a lot of positive feedback from visitors in the town.

One of the comments I've heard about the kiosks are to go to the kiosk to find a parking spot, but where do you park to go to

the kiosk? Yes. Yeah. I mean It's a little it's a little, yeah, it's a little tricky with that one. It's a, hey, next time, you can have it.

Are you? Looking for parking. Quick scan here.

I got a question as far as kiosk goes. How tough are they?

They haven't broken yet. And with the average residence

Somebody was, you know, to punch them, would it break it?

Potentially. Depending on the punch, depending if they've got any rings or anything on. It is a a rugged screen, so it's meant to be outside. It's meant to endorse some elements. There is a there is a protective layer over the front of it as well. But, you know, any like anything, if you get hit the right way or the right force, it it could crack and break.

I just asked that because I used to work for a company that built gas pump interfaces. Mhmm. And we actually built them. It was real thin aluminum, you could dent it, but it was touch screens through aluminum. So it's pretty cool stuff even back then. That was early two thousands.

And that's essentially one of the upgrades we'd be looking to make as well that we got feedback on. It's like, it'd be great if it's a touch screen of you can tap a location, and then it could say, here's how you walk to get there or open up more information about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Put it in more to a true kiosk mode. But we're installing eventually. It's like, let's let's see if they hit the ground running or if it ends up like a couple other municipalities where they just use it as a message board, then they're taping things to it.

We've got six of them.

There are currently four of them. Four of them.

Yeah. Okay.

One of the Clock Tower, one at the 5 Points, one at Human's Park, and one at the Riverwalk, Kiddy Corner from Discount Liquor.

And and they're about 12,000 a pop from what I think I read.

They yeah. And I think a lot of a lot of the cost of that project was getting the fiber to run to those locations. Oh, okay. Yeah. But the the structure is the majority of the cost. The actual inner workings of it is basically there there's not much to it. It's basically the display itself, a power reserve box, and then the price sign unit itself.

Thank you. Those kiosks, they're back with with the BrightSign?

Yeah. Each of each of the kiosks have a their own dedicated BrightSign unit too.

City Hall was built in 2009.

2019.

2018.

Okay.

In that budget for

160,000,

did you maybe add to purchase a few replacement items so that maybe we can get a longer life of a

For which item? Any of these were like

well, the Council Chamber specifically has 180,000 a lot of money.

Yes. So in trying to find that number, I reached out to our AV vendor and said, if we were to start from scratch and needing to replace everything, what's your expected cost? And they said for a room of that size with modern technology, they expect anywhere between $305,100,000 dollars. So with with the $150,000, it would be modernizing mostly programming, and we wouldn't expect to need that much money for it. But there's a lot that can go wrong in that room because there's a lot of moving pieces with it.

With with all due respect, there's a lot that does go wrong wrong in

that Yes.

There is.

Seriously. So, I mean,

if if we're looking two years, three years down the road to spend a $150,000, I'd love to see that money leveraged to make that experience a heck of a lot

better.

That's that's the goal. Yeah. It's it's not like, oh, let's buy a new monitor because we need new monitors. It it's gonna be a lot of let's let's relook at how we utilize the room, what we need to use the room

better for.

It's not a great look when someone is trying to present a presentation and has to move between four different locations to get that to show up on the screen.

So We did discover it was the it was the computer's fault. We're done. Yeah. The cables worked. Well,

you know Well, understandably so. Yeah.

I think you guys are aware of that, and I'm not trying to, you know, beat up on anybody, but it those are the kind of things that, you know, hopefully, we're putting money, yeah, to fix that experience.

And that that's the interesting especially and that's why we've got a little bit a larger number for council chambers because it is utilized the most out of out of our meeting rooms. Sure. And much more. Not not necessarily because it's more publicly visible, but because it is publicly visible. Yeah. We wanna make sure we have the best the best experience for people in the room and restaurants.

Any question? Chris, do you have anything to add on this?

No. You know, I would say one of the biggest challenges that Andrew faces is trying to figure out replacement schedules and all that stuff because a lot of this stuff is there is no, like, end of life for it. Mhmm. And there's so, like, how do you how do you plan for replacing this thing when it doesn't need to be replaced? And but then tomorrow, it could just fail. Yeah. And it could be as simple as it just needs a new power supply put in it, and it's fine. Or it could be something worse, and it then it does need to be replaced. So we've

had we've had all sides of that too. So we've had, you know, devices where literally the power of it, but, you know, was it a couple couple weeks ago or not? About a month ago at this point, we had a power supply fail on the camera switcher inside of council chambers. So it required us to physically film everything that was in there. It was literally just a a power bar that went bad.

May's able to swap it out. Everything worked again, and we have to go go from there. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's the trick of on the plus side, we have a new building with new technology, and we haven't had a lot of things fail. So we don't have a good hard line of, okay, these Samsung monitors are going to last 10 or they're going to last nine years. We're better luck with our knock on wood, we've been having better luck with our

newest some, you'll get three or less.

These are a little bit different. These aren't TVs per se. They're monitors. Everything's commercial grade. So it's consumer grade stuff does

Everything we go for a commercial grade monitor. When when in when in all we can, we try and get them to be actually monitors and not smart TVs that have extra bells and whistles that can go wrong on them.

And that's what's covered in your your standard maintenance and replacement line item? Is Correct. Yeah. That's essentially the contingency for the expected break fix things that occur.

Correct. Yeah. And and on top of that too, we do have a little bit of a buffer. We with our air AV vendor, we have a pay prepaid block just to make things easier as well. Because if we wanna get something fixed, we can put it against our prepaid block as opposed to their recently changed policy of getting each a a purchase order for each change that's over a certain dollar value.

Any other questions for Andrew on the AV side?

Okay. Thanks for coming in, Andrew. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Andrew.

Where you wanna go next, Chris?

We'll we'll just start rolling down the line here, and we'll move to, the PC replacement schedule. Okay. And

let's blow this up a little

bit more.

Thank you. Yeah.

So you can see our this is our five year replacement schedule. And and our replacement schedule actually goes out six years now for our for our computers. So the way we do our computer replacement is it's a warranty plus two. So our computers used to come with a three year warranty, and then we would run them to five years and replace them. But a new addition to the state contract is it's a four year warranty, so now we're going four years plus two without warranty.

And if something fails and we have to replace it out of cycle or replace it out of cycle, then and so be it. But that's the that's the plan. So you see the five year plan here, but it actually does stretch out six years because for the last two years now, we've been getting computers with four year warranty through the state contract. The peripheral and replacement, those are keyboards, mice, monitors, all that stuff. Again, it's more of the contingency plan for when they fail and or and need to be replaced.

We're not adding more monitors or anything like that. And so we don't we don't always go through this whole budget, but, you know, that's what it's there for. Let's see. I guess, the one thing that I would mention about this is towards last year, we really started leveraging our hardware asset management system to get all of our components in there. And, so we add, their cost.

So we know their replacement cost. We add, their warranty and then their expiration. And and that's been a huge help, especially because this year and next year, we if we if we're if we didn't have our asset management system, we have been blindsided by the amount of computers we needed to we needed to replace because this year and next year are all the COVID computers that we bought that were completely out of cycle, but we were buying laptops galore so people could go home and work. And, and now those are, you know, at their end of really, of usefulness. And so that's how that's how we determine what's getting replaced and that sort of thing.

And because most of our applications are web based, the amount of local resources that they they need aren't as taxing as they once were. And so it's a typical 500 gig SSD drive, which, you know, that helps with speed and performance over a lifetime. Of course, SSDs will their performance will degrade too, but not like a spinning disk. And then I think 16 gigs of memory is the standard. So

I five?

What's that? I five. I sevens, actually. Unit sevens. Yep. Yeah. It's only it was like, the price difference between the I five and the I seven is well worth it when you look at the actual performance. And then extending these things out six years, trying to get six years of use out of it, having that I seven is has been a big help.

When when did that switch, Chris, the five to six year change?

About about two years ago is when the state contract changed to where the laptops and desktops we buy come with the four year. K. So yeah. So we haven't we haven't, you know, we haven't got to those replacements yet. Yeah. That's So we're still on the replacing of the ones that are five years old.

That's, yeah, that's why I asked that because I was kinda curious if we were seeing, you know, decreased performance as we got to that extra year, but we don't know yet.

Yeah. For like I said, because most of what the staff are using are, you know, web based applications, you know, apart from, like, engineering that's using, like, AutoCAD and Civil three d and stuff like that. And but then they have a they have a different workstation spec because they need the higher end graphics cards and stuff like that.

So yep.

Any other questions regarding

Not to I was gonna ask Brandon not

to put you

on the spot, but you run IT for a a large public organization. How does that compare to, like, what you guys are doing with replacement cycles at the school district?

Yeah. It's different for staff and students. I mean, will use Sure. Disposable devices per se.

So we have

Staff cycles. Moved from a three to a four year, and that staff is is five year plus, we call it. Okay. We only purchase base warranties though, three year warranties. And then after that, we basically, the data just has proven that the repairs are minimal. The big thing I was gonna ask about this. So it's very comparable. They just have an extra year here. The hardware is pretty good, especially if you buy business class equipment. It's it just lasts. Does that warranty cover accidental? Is it, like, bumper to bumper per se, or is it just the hardware?

No. It's just the hardware. The standard hardware. We don't do

You're not doing extra?

So, like, like, our city assessors, they have, they have Microsoft Surfaces. The Surface Pro, the tablet looking style one, because they take them out in the field. And those we do buy the the extra coverage for because now they are out and about, and they can get dropped and and that sort of thing. But you're talking four or five out of, you know, a fleet of 700. So

Yeah. So, I mean, to me, that it makes sense. And, yeah, it's good. We say five plus because often we we replace it right around the six years as well.

And then, like and then those surfaces also have a rugged cover on there. The surfaces are pretty fragile,

so that's gonna be protect them, especially with the warranty on those things. Yep. An extra warranty.

Yeah. Bob?

With 2020 with COVID one of the laptops, and you you had people come back to the office. Right? There's some at home, are they?

No. Everyone's back in the office.

Right. So are you are you cutting back on the laptops purchases, or are you still replacing laptops per laptop?

No. We are we for most staff, it's a one to one rollout. So every staff have laptops. And part of that is how we do meeting rooms and training rooms. Okay.

So in the if you take the old city hall, for example, this room, which was much smaller, would have been called the lab, and it had a a desktop on every on every table. And then we would inevitably get called, like, the morning of a training or a demo in there, and then every one of those computers needed Windows updates, and it was hours, you know Right. And and those sorts of things. So that's what we started doing. And then so we started kinda preparing to go to that laptop rollout when we were, designing this building.

And then because then when COVID hit, well, that just kinda, you know Ramped it up. Ramped it up real quick. And now it just makes sense. Where because there was a lot of there was a lot of different staff positions that would never have thought to work for work from home ever. And then they had to. Right. Mhmm. And now they can if they need to. Okay. You know?

And those sorts of things. So that's kinda where we were starting to move that way in design of this building, and then, and then when COVID hit. And so we still do that. But when we look at, like, report rooms for, like, PD and fire, those are desktops because they're they're shared. So patrol the patrol room at the PD, you know, they have, like, a dozen desktops in there.

And so because you have one shift coming in that need to be on and then the shift going out that may need to be on. And so but just patrol officers. But once you get to, like, sergeant up, now you're now you're at a a laptop. Okay. But even even with the fire department, it's battalion chief and up is who gets laptops. Even the lieutenants, it's a desktop at the station because it's three lieutenants per station. Yeah. You know? And then there's two report room computers. Okay. Yeah. Any other questions?

Any other questions for Chris?

No. Okay.

Alright. Let's see here. One one project that we have coming up is a fiber relocation project that, we are doing with the school district and Carroll University. Right now, we have a lot of fiber that runs into the Lindholm Building, which is owned by Carroll. It used to be the administrative building for the school district, and now Carroll is getting rid of it.

They're either selling it or raising it. And I think school district's primary data center is still there. So we are gonna relocate to Les Paul Middle School. And so the reason one of the reasons why we have city fiber running into the school district office is because we share fiber from there going out with the school districts all over the place. The building's

off of is it Maple Terrace that's on? By the library. Yep. What's the road? What's that street called?

Maple Avenue?

Yeah. Maple. Maple.

Maple. Maple. Okay. Maple.

It's an older building, brick.

Yep. It's south of the South of the tracks. Okay.

William William Street tees into it, tees into Maple By La Estacion, and then Lindholm Buildings at the end of at the end of William Street.

Okay. I'm on the right page. I think you have

my study, man. Okay.

School. Yeah. Carol's kinda dispersing

her thing. Yeah. So we're so we're gonna reroute out of there and go into Les Paul Middle School.

They have

space there.

Oh, yeah. Okay. So it's a joint project between the three of us. Okay. And this is

the Citi's portion. So is that fiber primarily Citi fiber?

Like The fiber that the part of ours that's moving is Citi fiber. So we have a 48 strand that runs from here to Lindholm. Why I'm just I'm just curious.

I know there's probably a reason, but why why less why less poll and not the library? That's a good question.

Because, school district has the bulk of the fiber in Lindholm.

Okay.

And so they wanna move it to, Les Paul. Okay. And so for us, because we

We're we're just kind of a an attach we're we're a small piece of a bigger project.

Yes. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. And so you think about, like, a lot of our park shelters that have cameras or the door system. They're a point to point back to a school that's right next to the shelter, and then we ride school district fiber Yep. Back. Yeah. I I yeah.

I have no issues. I know we have a a good working relationship with the school district where that's concerned. I just I didn't know if I needed that context because I'm like, why are we moving it into the school district as opposed to a building that is technically a a city building? Yeah. That was but that makes sense if it's part of the whole bigger piece. Yeah. At least to me.

Any other questions around this project? Alright. Let's see. Our communications budget, this is the budget where we buy switches and routers, firewalls, and that sort of thing out of here. We've all of our switches throughout the city have been replaced in the last, let's say, seven years or so.

So we moved from Juniper to Cisco about seven years ago. Everything's been replaced. And right now, we need a couple of core switches in our, data center because they're they're coming up and and just being time to be replaced. And they're data center core switches, so they're pretty crucial. Yep.

Hey, Chris. Can you blow that up a little bit more for me, please? There you go. Thank you.

Yep. And then and then just for the five year plan, we just have a more of an arbitrary number in there for switch replacements. But switches are one of those things. Unless they've been end of life and they can't get patched anymore, you just run them. And they may run thirty years for you. Wow. You know? And then all of a sudden, one reboot later, they don't ever come back alive. You know? Yep. So I

wanna for thirty years.

And, our firewalls were replaced, two years ago. So as soon as we get an end of life from the manufacturer, then we will we'll we'll add that to here. So similar two switches is we get an end of life notification from the vendor. We don't we get end of sale. That's the first notification.

So now you can't buy that model anymore. And then it's end of life after that. And then after end of life, you can't update that model anymore. And for some things, it may you know, some devices aren't as critical as others. So like I said, right now, I think we're probably still a couple years away from even getting a notice that our firewall hardware will be end of life. So End of

life plus two. Because end does end of life drive replacement then?

Yeah. Yeah. Especially on a firewall, if you can't upgrade the firmware on a firewall anymore. Security. Yeah. That's

a Yep.

It's the lack

of software that drives it, but the they stopped building the software for them.

Right. Right. Yep. Yep. Chris, do you

you have your course switches on a cycle, though. Correct? Regular relatively regular cycle?

Yes. And that's

your stuff?

Yep. Okay. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Because this would be, yeah, this would be about five years.

Five years. Because

the data the the data center switches in this building were put in in twenty twenty twenty. We moved in in January '21.

Got it. Thank you. I don't

if you responded through the call. The

access points are good to go. We did, I think, 40 some access points this year. And and because of, like, this building, the police department, Buckner Pool, library, all those relatively recent construction projects, got new access points put in. Well, yeah, I think we did I think 42 is the number of access points that were replaced this year.

Do you have any spares in case one were to pay?

Yes. Yeah. We do.

Just wanna make sure you're covered.

Yep. This is like we have one of one of each model switch sitting on a shelf in our storage.

Okay. So I

got I got a question. Do we know percentage wise off the shelf versus what we built here in house? You know, what the percentage differences are.

What do you mean by that?

Well, you know, the total in house that we built in house many years ago when gosh, I can't even remember Brent was here.

Mhmm.

And then the guy before him, think was Bob. I can't remember. But anyway, quite a while ago, twenty years back, we built almost exclusively everything in house. Oh, applications? Yes. Apps.

Yeah. We don't do that anymore.

Oh, we do.

No. We do do have some that we do, but it's it's low code.

Okay.

So it's not your old school, you know, development like you used to have. Yeah. Everything we do now is low code.

Okay.

And it's the applications can be built very quickly and supported by just about anyone.

Okay. Yeah.

I think back then, it was a lot of ERP type look to what we built in house. Yeah.

Yep. Financial system was one and that we'd started to replace that because everybody that knew how to fix it was dying. Mhmm. So we realize that, you know, to do something different. But Yeah.

You're right, Steve.

That was when I got into that job Yeah.

Twenty years ago. That's just the case. That's Yeah. The I think, yeah. When I started here in 2013, there is because I managed the developers. When I get when I started here, I think we had over a dozen in house applications. Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. So most of those are gone, or they've been completely redone, like I said. With the tools that are out there today that we just own because of our Microsoft licensing and stuff, building Power Apps and all those different types of things, it's pretty easy. Yeah. But

All things change. Right?

Yeah. Any other

questions about communications? He's pretty straightforward. Straightforward. K. Go ahead, Chris. Alright.

Let's see here. Oh, yeah. This is our UPS replacement budget, and these are typically for our our smaller UPSs. Our large whole building UPSs that we have or our whole data center UPSs that we have are relatively new, and they're under warranty. And again, if we get to a point where they need we get an end of life on there, You know, UPSs, they're pretty simple simple devices, really.

And so even if you get an end of life, if you can still get batteries for them, you're usually pretty good. But something like for our data centers or like our dispatch center, as soon as we get an end of life, we're putting those things in the budget and getting them taken care of. So that's what this is, and this is, again, we'll run them till they fail and or to a point where the warranty doesn't cover them anymore, and then we'll replace.

Question. Billing is backup generators, isn't it? It doesn't it generate?

So the our yeah. So our data our UPSs in the data center came over from the old city hall and which had a really unreliable generator. And so we have, like, two hours of battery run time when we only need about thirty seconds for that generator to kick in. But if that generator doesn't kick in, now we have time to get the generator from the city garage, trailer it over here, plugged into the building On the trailer. And which, you know, that's a lot of coordinating. Now you're calling the firefighters to get their

pickup truck to get over

to city garage, hook onto the trailer. Get Jeff Hernke out here from Dallas, man. Right?

I've been running. They've tested it every month.

They They they exercise it on a regular basis. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You have to. And, you know, and then mother nature puts it in a live test every once in a while too.

Mhmm.

I think it's been up to three tests this year. Yeah. Because anytime anytime the power drops, we lose a livestream for cable for our our Cablecast livestream on YouTube. So we know the power's been out briefly because the desktop will go out and we'll lose that connection.

Yeah. There you go.

That's that. And that's that's it. There is Did you do

other item here. Did you do software, Chris?

Yep. I'm bringing it up right now. Okay. There's one one other item, and these are placeholders. So Thanks.

You heard the fireworks suite migration proposal tonight. So this is coming out of this CIP. So when we were gearing up for turning in CIP, was a couple months ago, we threw in some placeholders under software. We were looking at migrating our laser fees from on premise to the cloud because it has there's more application interfaces with the cloud one. But while the migration is relatively affordable, the annual maintenance goes up to about 70,000 a year.

So we are no longer doing that. So these two items, while they're in the CIP, budget book right now, they'll eventually get removed.

This is the document scanning piece part of the laser fish project?

Yeah. So Okay. When we look at the future year document scanning so when we moved into this building, we had a big scanning project that was built into Yep. This this building. Unfortunately, because it was part of that construction loan, you can only use it for the stuff with this building.

We couldn't expand that out to other departments. But but the way we're starting to use and really leverage Laserfiche here at City Hall, I just did a kind of a presentation on the different applications that we can do, we have, and things that we're capable to our leadership team a couple weeks ago. This 90,000 a year is starting to move out to other departments that are trying to currently digitize paper process processes. And then for critical paper records, get them scanned in and put them in a laser fiche. So, again, it's just a placeholder.

And so the plan is next year, start working with some of the departments, like, fire department's just starting to adopt Laserfiche. So Laserfiche is a a document management system. So for everyone in the room who's not familiar with it. So It's not the old. What was the old Microfiche. Microfiche. Remember Microfiche? Yeah.

Big screen with a thing you put

out on the

Yeah. You go to

library on that big dial. That's what you did. Right?

Yep. Yeah. So Laserfiche is just the the updated version.

Okay.

So updated, called it laser. You know? Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

So But, anyway, so that's what Laserfiche is, and it's nice because all those documents, it's really a Google search functionality. Community development's just a great use case for Laserfiche. They have over a million documents in there And those documents are documents that other departments need from them, you know, and they used to have to go find them in a four drawer file cabinet or a drawing, you know, and now it's totally digital. And the other thing too is there's a public facing portal, and community development leverages that to offset time staff doing open records requests. So they get an open records request, and they know that it's in that they can find it that public portal.

They just give them the link to the public portal to go search for what they want. Nice. And now we don't have staff running around looking trying to fulfill these open records requests.

You're referencing FOIA? Yeah. Okay.

Chris, how does the the bottom box tie in? The the the improved service level and efficiency. It talks about different projects like retention ponds and things. How does it

Yeah. This is a that wasn't that narrative was not updated from last year, which was a which would go really well with what we budgeted for last year. Yeah. I thought I noticed that when I was putting this document together, and I'm like, shoot.

The the the justification section, I think, is a carryover from

Yeah. A different The other thing about this too is, like, this got submitted, and then I knew, like, this is getting pulled out. And then I didn't get it pulled out of the before the book was put together and published. So

but like I said, this whole page is coming out. So so we're not doing the Laserfiche cloud migration. That's not on the table anymore because of the

cost of maintenance. Ongoing cost.

But the document scanning piece is remaining?

That because we still have The document scanning is future years. There's nothing for '26.

It's '27 and not. But but the plan is still to move to doing more of that

and Yes.

That cost we foresee will will be there in future years. Yes. And the fire the fireworks piece is that that's We don't need it anymore. K. Because that is superseded by what we did tonight with the other package.

Correct? So, again, when we had to get this the our CIP request in, we weren't sure if we were gonna have to pay for data migration or anything like that with fireworks, and so we had to get a number in here. And so I went with, kind of best guess and, but we don't need it. Like I said, there's a it's, $7,555, I think, is the implementation cost for fireworks. That sounds right. So And

is that that's hitting this year's budget as in 2025?

That's that 7,500 With 55? Yes. It will. Yeah. Yeah. We found that in this year's money. Yep. That's actually gonna come out of the CADRMS project because that was all tied in with that project. Okay. Yeah.

So so we don't have any other projects or pieces specific to other departments at this point?

No. Isn't that nice?

It's unusual. It's fine.

I mean Well, think about what we've done here. This CAT RMS project is a huge one. Right. Building inspections and permits. We're currently in next week is the last last vendor comes in to demo through the RFP process. And and so we'll be moving forward with that. And What system is that replacing? Trackit.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So Trackit was we went with that in 2014. That product has been bought and sold five times. Oh, yeah. I think the first time was a month after we signed on the dotted line.

Five times?

Yes. And it's gone from, like, very robust and customizable to, nope. It's out of box to, no. We can have APIs and, nope. We don't support APIs anymore. And and as and as you can imagine, this the support has been It's been in some part.

It's been

because, I mean, there's still some remnants of the original company that that has stuck with the product, but the customer support side is always just been a revolving door. Yeah. So but, yeah, I mean, we haven't really all the, like, kind of more major systems have been done.

Okay.

No. I'm not I'm not, you know, I'm not complaining.

I'm just The other thing too is that you don't see that we've been budgeting, you know, a couple $100,000 for each year is for server and storage stuff. But we if you remember, we moved from VMware to Nutanix, and with that, we bought that hardware. That hardware is seven years. So next year, you'll in two years, you'll see a number forecast in that sheet. So that sheet's not even here because it's just all zeros right now. But, yeah, in two years, you'll see you'll see a number for replacing that hardware. Because Different license. The physical hardware.

Okay. So yeah. Okay. Same servers.

Okay. That's a big

Do do our own testing, our own test beds, or does the vendor that's bringing us the new upgraded product, they bring all their equipment with them. Do we have enough spare equipment to make, you know, test beds?

We have on our servers, we have enough compute power to spin up test servers if we need it.

Yeah.

The cert the most of the systems that are in the cloud, we have a test environment.

Okay.

So like our financial systems in the cloud, we have test, train, and production. So we have three environments there. Our new CAD system, it'll be on premise, but it's the same thing. It's test, train and production. And then the RMS, if we there's still a lot of ongoing conversation around the RMS for the PD that we're going to land on.

We're not 100% sold on where we thought we were going a few months ago with it. But that one's in the cloud. The one that we're currently I'll say is the front runner. And, you know, again, train, test, prod. And so but, you know, it's different nowadays with server virtualization. You know, where you had racks and racks and racks of servers Yeah. Our data center is about this tall now, and it's 19 inches wide to be exact.

That's funny. It's in the

19 inches wide and six inches tall.

That's the data center. That you're seeing. Yeah.

Yeah. It's all Sure. It's all hyper converged is what they call it. Hyper converged infrastructure.

It's in the cloud. And most of of what it needs is in the cloud. Yeah.

That's for our on premise stuff, and then everything else is in the cloud where it makes sense.

That's interesting. Chris, I had one other question just in general. And I don't know if I don't know if these documents that are attached are completely up to date given when this was put together. But traditionally, things in the IT capital budget maybe I maybe I'm misremembering. I'm gonna withdraw that question. I'll ask that offline. Okay. Sure. Anything else? Any other questions, comments, concerns? Joe, do you have anything else? I'm good.

Thank you. Chris,

do you

have anything else?

That's that.

Wrap that up? Okay. This is really a matter of a report for us. So we don't really take any action with regards to these with regards to the budget. That's Joe and the finance committee's threshold, but our responsibility

Yeah.

Domain. There was a time where we used to have to actually rank projects. Yep. But

Bringing all the people, and they talk. And Yeah.

Okay. Well, that covers that item. We'll move on to communications and referrals. Chris, did you have anything else you wanted to talk about? You touched a little bit on RMS piece for CAD RMS. Yeah. Do you wanna provide not at this time. Any other update? I know we kind of anticipated seeing that by now. Sure. Well, as

you know, we we do have our CAD vendor contract locked in. We started biweekly meetings with them. We are getting ready to do the technical kickoff with them here towards the end of this month. And we have some we have a a short technical meeting with them next week. And say they got us the spreadsheet where we're filling out IP addresses and server names and and all and, you know, then they have the specs for compute hard drive and, memory.

And so we meet with them to discuss that, and then I believe October 21 was the the kickoff where we start spinning those or well, it should have those servers spun up and ready for them, and then they'll remote in and start installing. So and then the next step is to get the the law records management system. What we had was Fire's records management system tonight. But yeah. So we've been going down the road with one vendor. And, you know, and with all these things, you start to get cost creep in on the project. And so we have a meeting tomorrow. We're gonna pump the brakes on where we're going with it right now.

Do we run into any potential issue with regards to being able to get everything done the longer we wait to No. We're I

mean, we so we're just We're

a month out timeline, I guess.

We're a month out from having or two months out from having the CAD contract signed. Once we get the RMS good going, it'll be fine. We're both contracts are are as far as go live go, are are set so that everyone has to sign off and be ready to go live all in one shot.

Right. That's why I I I recognize that they all kinda have to interconnect. So okay.

Yeah. It's been a long, long, long, long process, I'm aware. That's true. Year three here. Again, I'm not here to beat you up. I'm just asking the question. And it's two years of implementation, just so everyone's aware. Right. Right. Okay.

Any other questions, comments from the board? Okay. Number seven on our agenda is adjournment. Is there any objection to adjourning our meeting? Hearing and seeing no objections, we are adjourned.