The committee voted to approve the Information Technology capital projects fund budget after staff outlined ongoing work to replace the city's legacy IBM i (AS/400, sometimes referred to as the I Series) system and to modernize phone and network infrastructure.

Director Pappas said the city is working with Tyler on permitting and licensing for the ERP project and that the permitting and licensing work is a large undertaking. “I'd love to say it'd be done in 2026. I think it's been informed it's going to be more of an 18 month project,” Pappas said, adding the project might wrap in mid-2027. He said the intent is to pull the legacy system out of production once the new system is in place and that archived data will be retained for historical reference.

Committee members pressed staff about several recent phone outages. Ald. Van Zielen asked whether the outages related to the new phone system. Pappas and other staff said there was not a single-system failure of the new phone service; instead, several incidents stemmed from Internet outages and a firewall configuration error during an upgrade that required a rollback. Staff said the backup Internet circuit has been difficult to bring online and that the firewall issue resulted from a configuration change that had not mattered previously but that, combined with a firmware upgrade, caused a serious overnight outage.

Staff said the move to an Internet-hosted phone system mitigates some failure modes because calls can still land at the hosted data center, where automatic answering and voicemail can still function even if calls don't pass through to city endpoints. The committee asked for continued public communications about outage impacts so callers understand whether phones are affected.

After the discussion the committee took a roll call vote on the IT capital projects fund budget. The motion passed unanimously (4-0).