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Cass County IT seeks council backing to move GIS to Esri and hire staff-augmentation support
Summary
County IT told the council the county’s legacy GIS will move from Elevate/Beacon to an Esri-based workflow and requested a positive recommendation for a staff-augmentation agreement that would cost about $40,000 per year and require a follow-up appropriation next month.
CJ, the county IT presenter, asked the council on Jan. 16 for a positive recommendation to pursue a migration of the county’s geographic information system from the Elevate/Beacon hosting environment to an Esri-based workflow and to use a staff-augmentation service to train departments.
CJ said the county currently pays "about $44,000 a year to use Elevate," which includes roughly "$20,000 in fees for different editing platforms." He said Beacon — which bought Elevate — does not include the same specialized editing modules and that moving to Esri would restore full editing capabilities across about 40–50 data layers that constitute the county’s GIS.
Explaining the staffing proposal, CJ said staff augmentation would cost "approximately $40,000 a year," provide one full day per month of on-site support plus about eight remote hours monthly, and help train highway, auditor, planning, surveyor and dispatch staff to create and maintain layers. He described the arrangement as a yearly agreement that could taper to a few hours per month after initial training.
CJ said the technical cleanup work previously contracted will be followed by the need to keep the data current, a task departments lack time and expertise to sustain. He asked the council for a "positive recommendation" and said he would return next month seeking an additional appropriation — he estimated he might request about "$25" (spoken as "probably 25" in the meeting) to cover the year’s cost, and clarified that figure was an estimate to be refined before a formal request.
Several council members and staff asked clarifying questions about how the Esri and Beacon platforms would interact, whether Esri licensing would continue, and how the proposed service would scale. CJ said Esri is a national mapping standard and that the migration would enable data to flow freely to other current mapping systems.
Next steps: CJ will pursue contract approval with county IT leadership (Jeff was named as part of that approval chain) and return to the council next month with a formal appropriation request contingent on Jeff’s sign-off and the finalized agreement.
Ending: The council did not vote on the request at the Jan. 16 meeting but gave CJ a positive recommendation to proceed to the commissioners and to return with a specific appropriation request.
