Council approves three‑year Granicus contract to modernize city website and meet ADA requirements

The Bloomington City Council approved a three‑year contract with Granicus LLC on March 23 to replace the city’s fragmented digital infrastructure with a unified Service Cloud Advanced platform intended to modernize the main website, subsites and the MyBloomington app, and to help the city meet federal ADA Title II accessibility requirements.

City IT staff and Granicus representatives told the council the current digital environment is aging and fragmented, and that recent Department of Justice/ADA guidance requires municipalities with more than 50,000 residents to ensure digital accessibility across sites and apps before April 2026. The proposed platform, staff said, offers built‑in tooling aligned with web‑content accessibility guidelines, unlimited ADA‑accessible forms and engagement pages, a consolidated mobile/resident service experience, a government‑experience digital assistant and reduced long‑term maintenance and licensing complexity.

Granicus representatives described typical operational benefits—citing an average call‑volume reduction of roughly 30% in jurisdictions that adopted similar tooling—and offered to provide case studies quantifying labor‑cost translations. Council members pressed for evidence connecting platform efficiency to realized labor or budget savings; Granicus offered follow‑up materials and case studies.

Councilor discussion also touched on integration with the city’s existing Hub single‑point‑of‑contact strategy and how digital form back‑end workflows could reduce manual processing. Member Hendricks moved approval; the motion was seconded and the council approved the contract with no nays announced.

Next steps: staff will work with Granicus on implementation, ADA onboarding, and migrating subsites and forms. Representatives said the contract includes annual consulting credits for ADA guidance and a dedicated account manager for onboarding and optimization.