City plans new headless CMS and RFP; staff requested a preliminary $500,000 budget ask

Director of Marketing Communications Drew and webmaster Tony Otero presented the city's website upgrade plan and a procurement timeline on June 9, saying the city will go out to bid for a headless CMS and modern front‑end to improve user experience and permit/service integrations.

Drew said staff completed analytics, internal/external surveys and department deep dives to compile functional requirements, and that the city aims to organize requirements as minimum, desired and excellence tiers for the RFP. "We started with analytics, data…we completed internal and external surveys," Tony said while explaining the user‑research underpinning requirements.

Drew told the council staff would seek an RFP period of about 30 days, score responses, and return with a recommended vendor and contract; as a placeholder he said he had submitted about $500,000 in the preliminary budget to support a phased phase‑one build. "I put in a half million dollars," Drew said when asked about the budget line.

Presenters described moving to a cloud‑hosted, headless CMS architecture to enable multiple presentation layers (city website, mobile apps and sub‑sites) to pull from one content source, reduce future migrations and allow phased integrations with permitting and business‑licensing portals. They emphasized that security and cloud hosting were priorities and that some integrations could be deferred to later phases to control initial costs.

Councilmembers asked about range of costs, integration with permit software, and notification subscriptions. Tony said integrations can be phased and that staff want a paperless, mobile-friendly permit experience where possible. Drew said staff would return with RFP responses, scoring results and a contract recommendation for council approval.

The council signaled support to proceed to RFP and asked staff to return with contract details, costs and implementation schedule.