How do we give us a hug

Just thank you for all the blessings that you bestow upon us.

Please watch over us as we conduct the city's business tonight and Christ and I think.gov.

I will entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda.

Is

there a second?

Second.

Motion and a second.

Is there any discussion?

Hearing none, I'll ask the city clerk for a roll call vote.

Council President Oliverett.

Yes.

Customer power.

Yes.

Customer towns.

Yes.

Customer Snowden.

Yes.

We have no public hearings.

We have no report from the manager this evening.

No proclamations and resolutions by the mayor and others.

Leads us to the report of the city manager.

Thank

you, Council President.

I just wanted to uh got some some people who are gonna present tonight.

I'm looking forward to introducing to them, but also just wanted to say that last weekend I had the privilege to uh be a judge for uh the American Legion post-555s um oratorical contest, and it I love doing that because it's a great experience.

I love watching the young people who are learning about American history, who are learning about the constitution, and just wanted to say he's not here this evening, but he's here a lot, and our own Lucas Calba uh one and uh just really really proud of him.

So um, but now what I would like to do is Chuck Crocker come up.

So we are going to be doing something new in that we're gonna try to do this every other month, but we're gonna bring a department head and a team from the city, and just let you tell them about some of the things they've been working on, and um love it that Chuck Crocker's gonna be first and his team from IT because about three and a half years ago we um so we used to outsource all of IT except for our help desk, and Matt was the only person who was here with us at the time, and it took forever to get that approved.

And uh we got Matt approved and he helped Dell in at the time, and so we started asking around when uh when our former uh person was uh taking over, you know, got a job offer she couldn't refuse from the federal government, which we were very proud of.

Um, but it was a big loss.

We started looking for who could really take a look, uh critical look at our IT infrastructure and basically bring our information technology in-house so to stop outsourcing it so we would have more control.

And so we learned through the grapevine about Chuck Crocker, who had retired from the city of Tuscaloosa, but certainly was not ready to retire.

So, um, he just uh we we found where he was gonna be, and we showed up at a at a gathering, and I think I was dressed in like black blazer and all this kind of stuff.

Not realizing that it was gonna be outside in the summer and like 90 degrees or 100 degrees or whatever it was, but but anything to to get the right person, right?

So we met Chuck at I'll never forget we met him and um and he has since uh come on with us, he's been here three years already.

So we tasked him with hey Chuck, bringing it in-house, and so his team uh along with Matt who was here with them, his team has followed from the city of Tuscaloosa.

I said at one point, uh, and Igeron's here.

Iran didn't come from the city of Tuscaloosa, we got him from um our own school district, so but I'm gonna turn it over to Chuck Crocker and let him introduce the team to you and also to talk about the work that they've been doing over the past three years, really, because it's been a lot.

Thank you, Chuck.

Thank you, Drudge.

Oh,

council, good afternoon, mayor.

Thank y'all for the opportunity to step up and and talk tonight and tell you a little bit about what the group of people we have here has been doing.

Gina, if you would put that first slide up for us, please.

So um, I want to tell you first of all who we are, and then talk just a little bit about the things that that an IT department does, and this this really probably fits with any city or any county government anywhere.

And um, so first of all, the the IT team.

So over the three years that we've been here together, as Gretchen said, Matt was here originally, and uh, you know, there are no words tonight to say how much I really owe him and how much the city of Pelham owes to him because this guy held things together by himself for a period of time and um that was a yeoman's job and Matt job well done um so just a really a couple weeks after I came aboard the uh we brought uh had a job posted and we we posted it we interviewed an Igeron Sumbury he joined us uh from the Pelham school system and uh so for about a year and a half maybe a little year and three quarters Matt Igeron myself began to start the process do the process that Gretchen had um has mentioned and part of that was to assess you know kind of where we were at what needed to be done and how to reel some of these things back in from service providers or or managed service providers as they're called and we did that over the course of about 16 months and and it took a little while to back out of some of the contracts and things that were in place but that gave us the time to look at what was in place what needed to be done and then how we would go about doing

that.

And so I I'm not going to try to just read through everything that you see there but by and large the two biggest things were that we needed to put together a network to connect all the locations um that the city of Pelham delivers government conducts business at there are about um I think we have 19 locations on our network and about 18 of those are things that we touch because the city of Pelham has things that they do day in and day out there and that is not necessarily an easy thing to do because you've got to have enough bandwidth and you know this from being at home and everybody's got a TV on streaming something different and all of a sudden speed goes down picture starts jerking things don't look well and we had a lot of those problems across the entirety of the city and most of that was due to inadequate bandwidth and maybe just design that needed to be brought up to date so over the period of 20 late 2023 through 2024 we did a lot of that work and began trying to decide what we're going to do how we're going to do it and how to put that in place and when I tell you that um we have ripped and replaced your infrastructure that is exactly what has happened and the credit to these folks because I think there are days when we've had things you know be down for whatever we were doing but by and large that work was done without a whole lot of catastrophic downtime that you you know you just can't do that.

And uh so a lot of that work was done over a period of time it was done very slowly measure twice cut once and get that done to where the city of Pelham has today a network that is put together properly we can talk across it people can do the things they need to do you have adequate internet access that was a big problem in some locations and we've also got some redundancies built in so that if one connection out to the internet goes down the other one will pick up and internet connectivity a lot of times seems

like

well what difference does that make well most everything you do today is hosted in the cloud somewhere and that that access being cut off means you can't work and and that could apply to a lot of our departments

here.

So we've done that work and we have that put together.

We have new equipment, new wireless uh Wi-Fi in most of the well, all the facilities, and we have the ability to proactively monitor that network and see what's going on with

it.

If something's down, we see it in a dashboard so that you're not uh wondering what's happening, you actually see what's happening.

We did not have that before, and we do have that now.

Um the other main item, and Matt can certainly speak to this.