441 time over to the Secretary for Will Call and Certification.

Mayor Proton Elizabeth Abraham?

Here.

Deputy Mayor Purchin Janet Butler.

Council member place to Scott Smith.

Council member place three, Andrew Ch.

Councilmember Place 4, Ken Oldman.

Council member place five, Laura Dale.

Here.

Can you ask certify the presence of the call?

Thank you.

Our presentation, item 3A, information technology strategies.

Alright, Mayor, tonight we have our IT director, Carter Smith here.

He's gonna give you a presentation on IT strategy.

This is a result of some conversation that we had a few months ago when some IT um equipment came before you all for approval.

So we wanted to take the opportunity to tell you why we do things the way we do it, what our strategies are, what our philosophies are from uh purchasing and replacement, um, and then get into a little bit about what our assets are.

I want you to keep in mind this is kind of a 30,000 foot view.

If you guys want to dive deeper, we can absolutely dive deeper.

Um, but this is what we would call a preliminary conversation to educate you guys and give you some baseline information, and if we need to, like I say, go further, we can.

Carter?

Thank you.

Uh start off.

We uh today we'll be going over, as Aretha said, the purchasing strategy, our life cycle strategy, and a general summary of all of our assets, uh larger assets, anyways.

Uh back in we went through and uh did a uh evaluation of how we used to go about purchasing larger items, and uh going back to 2010 up to 2017, we would largely use tax notes, uh CIP funds, and uh fair market value leases uh to uh for purchasing all of our larger um all of our larger equipment.

And uh in 2018, uh when I had some discussions with uh my predecessor uh over what his philosophy was, and he largely used again tax notes, CIP, added in some general funds for purchasing smaller items, and move to a lease purchase model uh for purchasing larger equipment.

And the big difference between the the between the two that caused them to move to that kind of model was that the fair market value, whenever you go into that kind of lease, uh you don't really own any of the equipment.

At the end of the lease, uh you're given the option to either immediately return it or you can purchase it for whatever the current market value is, whether that's $300 for a thousand dollar piece of equipment or fifty dollars.

Whereas the lease purchase model allows you to do a dollar buyout at the end, you now own it.

And so if you need some flexibility due to uh whether that's budget constraints or due to personnel resources, you just can't do the refresh that year.

Uh you can you can hold on to the equipment.

You now own uh and a large goal of his uh behind uh uh keeping to the leases rather than trying to purchase equipment outright every single budget cycle is the leases allow us to spread out these larger costs that over our $100,000, $75,000, or some of them were up to three to five hundred thousand dollars.

Uh spread them out over the course of four to seven years and not have uh the periodically of IT budget just absolutely peaking, and then you get a lot of questions over as to why it peaked.

It just makes it a little bit easier to plan out and uh plan for future purchases.

So uh we've largely kept that same kind of model.

Uh we recently did the the Dell hardware lease that we brought up to council earlier this year, and uh just uh a short little while ago we brought up the uh the business copier lease as well.

So these are for larger equipment orders.

We're continuing to use the lease purchase model.

Uh this includes things such as server arrays for hosting all of our servers, uh a bulk computer and laptop purchases whenever we're replacing all of our computers, and uh things such as our business copiers, just to name a few of our larger assets.

Um this also helps us avoid having different models spread out through all the departments as we would have if we buy them periodically, and it that makes it easier for support and making sure that everything's under warranty.

Um we are planning on uh a regular review schedule of all of our equipment life cycles under this model uh that will uh uh allow us to identify large purchases at least two years in advance, preferably have a five-year plan for uh reviewing all these leases and what's going to be coming off so that we're aware of what future purchases we need to make and how we need to plan out our budget.

For smaller orders, we've begun working on kind of a more of a case by case basis, as was such with the access points, which kind of go between they're kind of an awkward moment between the large and the small orders, uh TVs, conferencing equipment, uh monitors, and such.

The smaller smaller orders that uh typically have or typically have either longer life cycles, such as monitors, or kind of are more like consumables, such as keyboards and mice.

Uh purchasing outright does help us avoid the lease interest payments.

And so trying to try to avoid that with smaller uh smaller orders seemed uh seemed prudent.

Um questions with the IT purchasing strategy.

That's kind of generally what we were working for.

Um going over our life cycle strategy.

Uh we did find that in 2009 uh we had a council committee that was looked over all of our IT assets and made um recommendations as to what we need to replace, determinations as to what we needed to replace, and uh uh and it gave staff that uh that direction.

And so that kind of was our 2009, 2017 governed our what assets we had and when we replaced everything.

In 2018, uh one of my predecessors uh came in and established a life cycle guideline that was based off of uh current industry norms and manufacturer life recommendations, and so this establishes more of a regular cycle of okay when we purchase computers, the the manufacturer recommends we replace at this point.

We use these computers uh more than other computers and establishes a regular life cycle rather than having to review the entire organization every single time.

Um these the leases, the new lease model and the tax notes that were started in 2018 to 2020, were structured around these life cycle guidelines so that at the end of the lease is you can generally expect to be replacing all the equipment.

Um where we are now uh we're continuing that same model that was established in 2018 because a lot of those standards still apply today with some adjustments.

Uh desktops and laptops typically we expect a life cycle of four years.

Server arrays typically expect a life cycle of five years, which is one year more than what was established in 2018, due to new equipment that we purchased that has a slightly longer life cycle.

Uh things such as firewall and other networking equipment can be anywhere from seven to ten years.

Uh things such as business copiers that we just uh uh signed off at least for every five years.

Um I'll point out that uh things such some of them have really long life cycles.

Originally uh the switches per the plan should be replaced every between six and seven years, but talking to our manufacturer, they support and provide warranty for their equipment up to nine to ten years.

Uh so we're able to get some cost savings by expanding those out as long as we're not seeing any um depreciation in their uh in their operation.