Joel, the county’s IT presenter, gave the committee an annual IT shared-services review and a preview of major 2026 projects.

Joel said the IT shared-services group developed an estimated-value formula based on the number of devices a municipality manages (routers, switches, servers, desktops and tablets), and that the county began tracking support tickets in mid-2025. He said the shared-services help-desk handled about 426 support hours in Q3–Q4 and that, using a conservative market rate of $180 per hour for external vendors, that equates to “over $76,000 that we save municipalities.” Joel noted that the figure excludes server monitoring, proactive maintenance and other behind-the-scenes work that increases the program’s value.

Joel described common vendor rates he sees in the market—$180 per hour for general help-desk work, about $275 per hour for server administration and up to $325 per hour for high-level architecture work—and said the county does as much as possible in-house while engaging vendors when necessary.

Looking ahead to 2026, Joel outlined major countywide IT projects: a card-access system tied to an active building remodel, an upgrade of the county’s document-management software and a planned medical-records system update that will require IT resources, replacement of the Citrix shared-desktop environment with a more secure, lower-cost remote-access solution (Joel estimated savings of at least $50,000 annually), a phone-system upgrade to replace equipment more than seven years old, and continued migration to Office 365 cloud services and consolidated shared document libraries.

Joel also explained staffing priorities and support distribution: the sheriff’s office has a dedicated on-site IT support person because of 24/7 operational and security needs, while other county departments receive support from the shared-services team. Committee members asked whether current ticketing numbers point to particular problem areas; Joel said the data set is still small but that the county will track trends over time.

Joel said he will continue presenting annual IT reviews and that staff will refine the ticketing and monitoring data to better show trends and value. The committee thanked Joel for the report and moved on.