Alberto Cerrelli, IT Director, presented the Information Technology department's operating and capital requests and explained several large planned investments.

Cerrelli described a managed migration of the city's BS&A enterprise resource-planning software to a cloud-hosted platform and workflow optimization; staff budgeted $247,000 for the migration and process work. The on-premises BS&A system is reaching the end of its feature updates, he said.

He outlined a set of other capital requests: a production server host replacement ($148,000) with existing hosts repurposed as backups; virtual-desktop-infrastructure (VDI) replacement and scale improvements budgeted at $856,000 to meet present and projected user needs; a managed network-security analytics and traffic detection/response system ($67,000); Exchange migration budgeted at $30,000; and a fiber-termination move ($14,000) to simplify the network topology after the police department's prior on-site servers were consolidated into the City Hall server room.

Cerrelli also requested hardware switches, firewall and endpoint-security investments, and replacement cycles for desktop equipment. He described the city's current inventory (rough counts): roughly 529 desktops/laptops/tablets, 103 virtual and physical servers, 75 wireless access points, over 200 security cameras, and dozens of access-controlled doors and AV systems. Cerrelli said the IT capital plan aims to shift aging on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-first posture where appropriate while maintaining critical on-prem functions during a multi-year transition.

Commissioners asked about cloud phone/Teams-based calling alternatives and were told a future analysis would be appropriate when the current phone system reaches end-of-life. Cerrelli said the city is also evaluating controlled use of generative-AI tools for staff and awaiting county AI policy guidance before broad internal rollout.

Cerrelli said the department reduced its overall personnel and operating budget from the prior year by reallocating some work and that several high-ticket items in the capital plan are multi-year projects tied to end-of-life dates for existing appliances.