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Technology commission backs change order to add Meraki switches after DPW outages
Summary
Franklin Technology Commission recommended a TPx change order to add five Cisco Meraki switches to the city's fiber ring after repeated Department of Public Works outages revealed routing and failover problems. The commission recommended funding adjustments and will request a common council budget amendment.
The Franklin Technology Commission on Oct. 22 recommended a change order to the city's TPx WAN/firewall contract to add five Cisco Meraki switches to remote sites after multiple outages exposed a weakness in the fiber ring when the Department of Public Works (DPW) lost power.
The change order, presented by IT Director Jim Matoski, calls for new 24-port Meraki switches at five remote offices to enable better link aggregation and to resolve a spanning-tree blocking issue that currently forces traffic to route in only one direction when parts of the ring go offline. Matoski told commissioners the work is "a needed element" and that "it is absolutely essential to the city that we have reliable, fault tolerant, highly redundant Internet." The commission moved to recommend the change order and the motion carried.
Why it matters: The city's fiber WAN was built as a redundant ring and is the main route to state/education-only WISCNET and the Education and Community Center (ECC). During construction-related outages in June and transformer outages and a flood event in August 2025, the DPW lost power and sites fell back to Spectrum backup circuits; that failover revealed that routing around the ring did not always reconverge when an entire site dropped, which could have interfered with critical functions such as VPN access and mutual-aid dispatching.
What the work would do: Matoski said Meraki switches will provide the required SFP/fiber ports and allow link aggregation so each site can use active-active uplinks for the primary (WISCNET) and backup (Spectrum) Internet paths. The proposal also calls for per-site configuration of spanning-tree root/designated bridges to ensure the network converges correctly whether traffic flows clockwise or counterclockwise around the ring.
Costs and funding: The presentation listed a fixed hardware cost for five switches at $21,003.91 and an increase in ongoing licensing/support (Meraki licensing) of $28.95 per month (as quoted). Matoski said IT plans to use unused funds from the terminated HBS contract (about $17,009 remaining after a $1,677 exit fee) and the remainder would come from IT's data-processing project budget; implementing the change will require a common council budget amendment.
Operational risks and related fixes: Beyond switches, Matoski described configuration gaps discovered during testing: mutual-aid VPN tunnels used by Milwaukee County ("Cat 2 Cat TELUS") were single-tunneled and must be converted to active-passive configurations at the county; NetMotion (the police mobile VPN) required a second server and client reconfiguration so squad-car devices can operate correctly on the Spectrum backup; and one fire station previously lacked a Spectrum backup drop until the union contract was changed. Matoski said TPx will perform fault-insertion testing (pulling a site offline) as part of the contracted integration work.
Commission action and next steps: The Technology Commission voted to recommend the change order; the item will move to the common council for final approval and the city will pursue a budget amendment to cover the remaining cost. The commission will also require proof of post-installation tests that show SD-WAN failover, ring reconvergence in both directions, and restoration of mutual-aid VPN resiliency.
Votes at the Technology Commission meeting: Commissioners approved the meeting minutes earlier in the session (motion carried) and then made and seconded a motion to recommend the TPx change order; the latter motion carried with no roll-call tally recorded in the transcript.
Ending: Matoski said the ring can support future growth, including potential 10-gig links, but emphasized the immediate priority is to eliminate the single-direction failover behavior that was exposed by DPW power outages. He noted that some hardware and configuration upgrades at the ECC and police department likely will be prioritized for higher-capacity uplinks if monitoring shows saturation after migration of additional services to cloud platforms.
