Finance committee weighs expanding use of CityWorks to prioritize CIP projects

The Haines Borough Finance Committee debated whether to expand use of the CityWorks asset-management platform on Monday, focusing on whether the software could provide a reliable, data-driven way to prioritize capital improvement projects and maintenance needs.

Committee members and staff framed the discussion around the borough’s existing investment in CityWorks and the practical burden of populating the system with accurate asset data. A staff speaker noted the borough currently pays about $16,000 a year for the software and cautioned that license fees are only part of the cost: "even though we pay $16,000 a year for it, that's a small amount relative to what we would need to invest in terms of staff time, to realize utilizing it the way you're talking about," the staff member said.

Proponents pointed to CityWorks’ GIS-based "operational insights" module as a source of objective information for budgeting and triage. One committee member described the module and how it scores the "probability of failure" and the "consequence of failure" for each asset, saying it could help move decision-making beyond the loudest complaints to where the borough’s assets truly present the biggest risk.

Others raised usability and implementation concerns. A staff speaker who uses the system in day-to-day operations told the committee that CityWorks has a steep learning curve and requires sustained training and back-end IT support to make it broadly useful. "I was going to give it another year," the staff member said of the borough's approach to the platform, and recommended more frequent training and vendor engagement: "we owe at least another year of trying to make it work optimally for us."

Committee members also highlighted that institutional knowledge exists in specific staff (Dennis, Brad) and suggested using the current CIP list as a practical dataset for training and pilot work. One member warned that the platform can be "like a Ferrari" — powerful but difficult to operate — and argued that if the borough can better leverage the tool it could pay long-term dividends for budgeting and asset management.

Next steps the committee endorsed include asking major departments to review how they currently use technology, pilot a targeted rollout using CIP entries as training data, and arrange further conversations with staff and the member who initially raised CityWorks to clarify intended uses and feasibility. The committee did not take formal action to change procurement or cancel the license during the meeting; members said they will revisit the platform after department-level reviews and additional training.