Franklin committee reviews support-services budgets, proposes contract specialist and IT investments

Margaret Wilson, the city of Franklin’s finance director, told the Budget & Finance Committee on Feb. 19 that the finance department is responsible for accounting, audits, payroll and purchasing support and that the city had "no audit findings in our fiscal 2025 audits." She asked the committee to fund a contract specialist — a repurposed, previously unfunded contracts-administrator position — to manage large upcoming capital projects such as the new water plant and City Hall and to relieve accounts-payable workload.

Michael Walters Young, the city’s chief budget and performance officer, outlined how Franklin records interfund transfers that allocate shared staff time to enterprise funds and said that, "to run the finance department, it really costs $1,900,000," excluding interfund recoveries. Young said staff will provide supporting spreadsheets on the methodology for allocating interfund percentages on request.

IT Director Jason Potts and Assistant Director Brandy Arnett presented three program enhancement requests: tier-2 data-center storage to move stale data off higher-cost platforms, an administrative artificial-intelligence platform to explore automated, human-centered productivity tools, and organization-wide professional-communications software to improve written communications. Potts also highlighted recent infrastructure investments, including a 400-gig direct fiber link between the main data center and the disaster-recovery site, virtualization of SCADA sites for automatic failover and a GIS-based fiber-asset inventory.

Committee members asked about recurring costs and transparency for interfund transfers and asked staff to supply more granular backup for the allocations. Staff said the data-storage request includes a one-time investment (detailed in budget attachments) while the AI and communications licenses are recurring service subscriptions.