Of the uh panel operations to order.

Uh you want to call the rule?

Taylor Brown is absent.

Tom Counts?

Here.

Heather Carr?

Here.

Dee Miller is absent.

And Tyler Herman is not present yet.

Okay.

The minutes were included in the materials.

Heather, did you have any comments?

I had no comments.

Okay, Mayor.

Thank you.

The minutes will be approved by consensus.

The next item on our agenda is an IT update.

Andy.

Thanks, Mayor.

I'd like to introduce our partner in this endeavor, who's here and open writing some comments and overview for you.

As we get started, I thought it would be a good opportunity to lay some context.

We've seen an awful lot of change over the last five years.

Back in 2023, we began working diligently with Doug to research the market.

We talked about creating a position internally to replace what was an outdated service contract at the time that have been in place over 15 years.

Since that time, we've had some transition internally within the organization, including the departure of our last finance director.

And I think it's also important to note that finance has traditionally and historically been the oversight unit of governance structure in the city to oversee IT.

Sam's taken on that role, but she does not have that IT oversight.

We've been focusing mainly with Doug and the administration.

We ended up selecting Easy IT out of the Dublin area.

And we have had conversation with council about the process moving forward.

And we're at, and I just wanted to provide that brief introduction before Doug speaks in terms of the perspective that we find ourselves in right now.

Is we've had uh an RFQ that was advertised in 2023.

We selected a vendor in the middle of 2024, early 2024, and then we've had this transition.

So we really have not experienced an entire year of uh my girl.

Um we haven't had uh a full capacity experience with that just yet.

So I just captioned discussion with that um consideration of the background because it's been challenging for us to get a real appraisal as how we're working operationally, and there's still a lot of work that we need to do.

Uh but with council uh input and the operations oversight and direction, I think we'll get to where we need to be.

Uh is there any general questions that you have before I turn it over to Doug for his overview?

No.

Doug, thanks for being here.

Sure.

Welcome.

Good evening, uh, everybody.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I hope to speak to you in the future on other topics.

This evening, uh, I am responding on behalf of the city uh to council's direction that um uh it is asked essentially city staff to uh rebid uh the contract for the IT services, and I wanted to respond to that, uh communicate about where I think we are with that, and make a couple of requests in terms of some guidance where that's concerned.

I I want to say right up front that you know we're responsive to the direction and we'll follow the direction to the best of our ability as we understand it.

Um I wanted to bring up uh in in pursuit of this uh this uh direction uh for the RFP.

Uh I wanted to make sure that we're in line with uh the expected outcomes and and we'd also like to uh request a time extension.

Prior to uh council giving this direction, we went through what easy IT called ER or an executive business review.

At that time, we met here in this building and we talked about their first year in which they sat down with us, asked us for honest feedback, talked to us about how they thought they had did, and we went through all of that information.

We did not have council's input on that.

That's definitely a miss.

Uh in hindsight, it's probably not a good idea for to go through that process without having heard from council.

As a result, we then heard new information from council and concerns and some of these things leading to saying you really need to go out to bid again and let's let's get this taken care of.

We did not provide that feedback back to uh EZ IT.

We felt that it was important to provide that feedback and just have another conversation with them because we didn't really feel like we had correct information going towards the correct places.

We have had that that follow-up meeting and had an honest conversation with them about the direction we've received to follow up with another uh RFP, but also some concerns that we have.

First of all, they described, you know, there's about 99% of what they do and have done over the last year, is typically pretty invisible to us.

And just by way of background, they made significant security changes, infrastructure changes, new contracts, uh, new passwords.