Jacksonville Beach approves new Central Square ERP agreement, authorizes execution

The Jacksonville Beach City Council voted to approve a solutions agreement with software vendor Central Square and separately authorized the mayor and city manager to sign the agreement, council records show.

City IT Director Bill Reager told the council the agreement will replace the city's Tyler Munis enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and centralize functions including billing, payroll/HR, permit management, enterprise asset management and payment processing. Reager said Central Square will also remote-host the city's current IBM AS/400 hardware.

The move is intended to add employee self-service HR tools, modernize permit tracking and create a centralized asset-management system that replaces spreadsheets and disparate departmental processes, Reager said. He said the permitted functions will integrate with the city's GIS environment.

City Chief Financial Officer Ashley Gossett told council the contract carries an annual subscription (maintenance) cost of roughly $330,000 and a one-time implementation cost of about $61,000. She said the city will receive a $155,000 credit in its current Central Square agreement and a $68,000 credit from Munis, producing a net impact to the current-year budget of $108,000, as stated by the CFO during the meeting. Reager later described the net annual increase in slightly different terms (about $105,000) while explaining how some existing maintenance fees will end; both figures were given on the record.

Council members asked about built-in escalators in the subscription. Staff said the contract includes a 3% annual increase for years two and three, 4% for years four and five, and 5% thereafter — a standard escalation clause, staff said. Reager and Gossett said remote-hosted solutions increasingly use subscription pricing and that many vendors no longer offer locally hosted licenses.

Two separate council motions were recorded: one approving the solutions agreement and another authorizing the mayor and city manager to execute it. The first motion passed by roll call (Golding, Horn, Janssen, Sutton, Wagner, Wouters and Mayor Hoffman voting yes). The subsequent authorization also passed (Horn, Johnson, Sutton, Wagner, Wilders, Golding and Mayor Hoffman voting yes).

Council members and staff described planned budget offsets and operational benefits: remote hosting of aging hardware, consolidated maintenance responsibilities, and a new enterprise asset-management module that staff said would replace manual tracking and allow scheduled maintenance across departments. Staff said the city intends to include the subscription costs in its leased properties fund and that annual subscription and maintenance spending across the city currently totals roughly $850,000.

Mayor and council members said they view the package as a multi-year modernization that will require future review and renegotiation at the five-year mark.

Action details and roll-call votes are recorded in the city minutes.