Jackson budget workshop highlights rising IT and subscription costs

Town Manager Tyler Sinclair told the Jackson Town Council at its April 21 workshop that much of the town's proposed year-over-year budget increase is driven by information-technology (IT) contract and subscription costs. Sinclair said the townwide IT charge increased notably this budget cycle and flagged individual vendor contracts as a primary cause of the jump. "When you think about townwide IT, Zoho is gonna come up ... that one has actually gone up 55%," he said, adding that IT increases account for a large share of a 15.4% change figure shown to council members. The rise is not unique to Jackson, Sinclair told the council, calling it an industry-wide trend since 2020 and warning that subscription models (instead of perpetual software licenses) have shifted costs into recurring annual charges. "No sooner do we adopt a technology than we also begin to charge back the cost of that technology to ourselves," he said, and noted the town's IT services fund is used to allocate those recurring costs across departments. Zolo, the town's IT director, emphasized that the council should see clearer line-item detail about what each department is buying. "We are seeing a real ballooning of these costs ... it's time to shine more of a spotlight on what are the details," he said, arguing that department directors ought to be able to show which subscriptions deliver efficiencies. Council members pressed staff on whether higher IT spending is buying measurable efficiencies. Zolo and other department leaders cited examples: the police department's Axon subscription includes AI-assisted report writing and body-camera integration, which Chief Michelle Weber said has helped officers draft reports more efficiently while requiring human review. "It's not always right... but it's a good opportunity to ... make sure that all that detail is there," Weber said of AI-assisted tools. Town legal staff described a records-management software request of $30,000 annually and the finance department identified a $19,000 recurring request for budget software plus a $7,500 budgeting-tool fee; Sinclair called these recurring software asks a key factor in longer-term cost growth. "We're not necessarily creating new things... but these are reoccurring expenses going forward," he said. Sinclair and Zolo urged caution: while some technologies can create capacity or modest efficiency gains, they said the town should avoid the expectation that software alone will replace full-time staff. Zolo warned against equating every dollar spent on IT with an automatic reduction in other personnel costs. The council asked staff to provide more granular, department-level detail on recurring IT contracts and to continue demoing alternative tools; Sinclair said the town will continue testing products (and negotiating contract terms that preserve data portability) and will include IT charges in the budget-change log the council will review as the process continues. Ending Council members signaled interest in seeing the detailed chargebacks that make up the IT services fund and in reviewing the specific software contracts that account for the largest increases. Staff said they will provide additional line-item detail and continue demonstrations of alternatives before finalizing the budget.