Red Bud council approves one-year Municode contract to host searchable city code

The Red Bud city council voted to contract Municode for a one-year hosted, searchable version of the city’s ordinances, the council decided at its regular meeting. The motion, made by the presiding council member (S3), passed by voice vote after Council members asked staff to clarify data-retention and termination terms before the contract extends further.

Council members said the existing city code — stored as roughly 20 separate PDF files on the city website — is difficult for residents to search. Jill, the staff member who briefed the council on the project, said a hosted service would let staff and residents search the code by keyword and access draft language and template ordinances from other municipalities.

"Currently, the way that we have them right now, the code book is broken up into about 20 different PDFs on our website," Jill said, describing the current files and the barriers they pose. She recommended Municode as the lower-cost and more responsive option after comparing two quotes from Municode and American Legal (the transcript also referenced a vendor described as "Unicode").

Council discussion addressed whether the public would actually use the hosted code and how the city could measure usage. Jill said the public finds the current PDFs cumbersome and that the hosted product would be easier to search; she also noted some initial implementation costs for ingesting the code into the vendor’s system.

A council member cited a five-year total cost of $16,765 during the discussion; Jill and others clarified that Municode also offers annual (year-by-year) pricing while American Legal’s quote was presented as a five-year contract. Jill said Municode requires 60 days’ notice to terminate service and that the city would retain its own copies of the code if it chose to cancel the vendor contract.

The motion approved a one-year Municode contract "as long as she gets positive feedback on her questions," according to the motion language recorded in the meeting. The vote was taken by voice and recorded in the minutes as "motion carried;" the transcript does not include a roll-call tally of yes/no votes.

Next steps: staff will follow up with the vendor to clarify outstanding questions on data retention, app compatibility and usage metrics and report back at or before the next council meeting. The council left the item under finance for final approval pending those clarifications.