Council approves nearly $700,000 cloud software migration after debate

The Flint City Council approved a proposal to migrate the city’s enterprise software to a cloud-hosted platform, voting 7–1 after more than an hour of questions about cost and benefits.

Supporters said the move would harden the city against cyberattacks and free staff time by letting resource-intensive reports run in the cloud instead of during work hours. A city IT representative said the migration would protect personnel and financial data and prevent the kind of multiweek outage the city suffered during a recent cyberattack.

Opponents questioned whether the roughly $600,000–$700,000 one-time expense represented the best use of limited municipal resources. “That’s $700,000. That’s in my mind [that it] won’t benefit the city of Flint residents,” Councilman Feifer said during debate, concluding he would vote against the measure. Feifer was the lone no vote.

Council members in favor said the cost was funded from the city’s internal service fund rather than the general fund and argued the migration could reduce thousands of man-hours spent running slow local reports, improve payment and banking workflows and lower future audit and recovery costs tied to outages. “Had we had this during the cyberattack, we would have been far better off,” a network administrator who spoke during the hearing said.

The council approved the resolution by roll call (seven yes, one no). The vendor timeline discussed at the meeting projected an eventual end-of-life for the current on-premise software in later years, bolstering proponents’ argument for an earlier transition. The city will proceed with contract and implementation planning and training paid from the internal service fund.