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Westminster IT seeks cloud, security and AV upgrades in 2025; budget up 18% as licensing costs rise
Summary
The information technology department outlined a 2025 budget that increases primarily for software subscriptions, proposes hiring the city’s first dedicated project manager and plans a CrowdStrike rollout funded in part by a state grant; councilors asked about licensing costs, storage and potential long-term stabilization.
At the Feb. 3 study session the city’s information technology (IT) director presented the department’s 2025 operating priorities and budget, highlighting rising software-subscription costs, a planned cybersecurity rollout and investments in wireless and audiovisual systems across city facilities.
Chris Lindsay, assistant city manager, introduced the department’s presentation. IT director Monica Thoreau (as identified in Q&A) said the department supports more than 1,100 city employees and that the 2025 budget shows an 18% increase over 2024, driven primarily by contractual subscription services rather than capital purchases.
Key takeaways
- Budget and staffing: Thoreau said the IT department has about 41 staff and plans to hire its first dedicated project manager in 2025 to coordinate multiple enterprise projects. The budget increase is mainly for recurring software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions.
- Major costs called out: The presentation listed Microsoft 365 licensing at about $1.2 million and Azure cloud usage at roughly $140,000 as two of the largest recurring line items.
- Cybersecurity and grants: Westminster received a state grant to implement CrowdStrike endpoint-detection and response; the city is implementing the solution in 2025 at a grant-funded tier and expects a discounted ongoing price thereafter.
- Infrastructure priorities: Top near-term projects include replacing and expanding wireless access across city facilities, upgrading conference-room audiovisual systems (planned under master services agreements), completing multifactor-authentication (MFA) migration with a VPN/firewall change, replacing aging storage-area-network hardware for file and backup storage, and increasing internet circuit speed and redundancy.
Council questions and discussion
Councilors asked for details about in-house software engineering capacity (Thoreau said six software engineers and a supervisor), the age of the city’s JD Edwards ERP (noted as a long-running system with ongoing vendor updates), and whether subscription-cost growth will stabilize. Thoreau said IT seeks multiyear contracts where possible to reduce year-to-year spikes and is investigating automation and cloud-managed services to gain efficiencies.
On artificial intelligence tools, Thoreau said the city is piloting Microsoft Teams Premium features and other AI meeting companions, with careful evaluation of use cases for minutes and transcription. The department also reported a new walk-up help desk for employees at a parks-and-rec facility, which staff said had been a popular operational change.
What was not decided
There were no votes on budget items in this session. Staff signaled it will proceed with planned procurements and projects subject to council budget approval in the formal budget process.
Quote
"IT supports every single 1,100 plus city employees while providing the best cost computing equipment and software," the IT director said during the presentation.
Next steps
IT said it will return with budget materials during the regular budget process, continue security and MFA deployments in 2025, and pursue multiyear procurement when beneficial to lower subscription cost volatility.
