DPS outlines $97 million in technology funding and modernization goals, including AI pilot and improved interoperability
Get AI-powered insights, summaries, and transcripts
Sign Up Free
Summary
Chief Jessica Belew presented the IT division—s modernization plan, described a $97 million allocation for technology exceptional items, pilots for vehicle connectivity and satellite-augmented communications, an AI contact-center pilot, and plans to retire the mainframe in early 2026.
Chief Jessica Belew, head of the Department of Public Safety—s IT division, briefed the commission on officers— and systems support, cybersecurity activity, interoperability goals and modernization funded by the recent legislative appropriations.
Belew said the division manages roughly 1,200 servers and almost 3 petabytes of data, supports about 500 applications and 40,000 endpoints, and processed more than 170,000 requests over the past year. She outlined strategic goals including workforce investment, replacing end-of-life applications and expanding situational awareness tools to improve first-responder communications.
On funding, Belew said the department requested about $220 million in the last legislative session and received approximately $97 million in exceptional-item technology funding. "We've received about $97,000,000 for technology-related exceptional items," she said, and described categories for investment: disaster recovery, network and data security, cataloging and sharing data, and modernizing applications and hardware.
Belew described pilots and projects: a vehicle-connectivity pilot that used satellite fallback to maintain continuous connectivity in low-signal areas; a tactical awareness kit (TAC) demonstration that provided shared maps and search-tracking for multiagency responses; an AI "agentic" bot being piloted to augment contact-center capacity; digital evidence management for secure storage and disaster recovery; and a plan to retire the mainframe in early 2026.
Commissioners offered no major objections and thanked the IT team for the work. Chief Belew said the division will continue to present project-level details to the commission as work moves to implementation.