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Nibley public works outlines $17,500-a-year asset management subscription, seeks council direction
Summary
Public works director presented two vendors for an asset-management system to track water, sewer, parks and streets. Staff recommended a lower-cost local vendor at $17,500/year with one-time setup included; council asked for more budget detail and asked staff to return with a funding plan.
Nibley City public works director Steve Lisonbee presented a workshop on modernizing asset and work-order management for the city on Aug. 21, saying the software would centralize records for sidewalks, signs, water lines, hydrants, parks and other city-owned assets and make cost reporting and preventative maintenance easier. Lisonbee said current record keeping relies on spreadsheets and staff memory, which complicates budgeting and warranty tracking; an asset system would attach costs, equipment and labor to each repair and create field-accessible work orders.
Lisonbee summarized two vendor packages. One local vendor’s proposal was presented as the recommended option: an initial implementation and training bundled with three functional modules (public works, parks, stormwater) for a total first-year cost of $17,500 and annual renewals thereafter. He estimated the vendor’s standard inflation clause at about 5% per year but said the vendor has not historically raised prices. A second, larger vendor (OpenGov) was shown as a higher-cost alternative with greater setup and subscription expenses.
Council members asked how the city would pay for the subscription because the item was not included in the adopted budget. City manager Justin Mahon and Lisonbee told council the budget was adopted conservatively and that staff could either reopen the budget or look at remaining year-end balances to repurpose funds. Mahon said he would not recommend using impact fees to buy subscription software without a formal legal review; impact fees are dedicated to growth-related capital projects and generally must be tied to specific projects.
Several council members asked staff to quantify expected efficiency gains and a breakeven calculation. Lisonbee said he could not provide an immediate, robust ROI number but pointed to gains in time saved by crews, better preventative maintenance scheduling and more accurate, auditable cost reporting for repairs that now take weeks to assemble from disparate records. Council members also discussed contract length (vendor proposed year-to-year) and whether to include the subscription as an ongoing line in the annual budget if adopted.
Council consensus: workshop only. Staff was asked to return with the following before any purchase: (1) a budget amendment or funding plan showing where first-year and ongoing costs would be paid from; (2) a clearer breakeven/efficiency estimate comparing current and projected labor and equipment costs; and (3) vendor references and a draft support/termination clause for review. No contract was approved at this meeting.
