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The rising cost of technology software gave the Minot City Council pause at its Monday, Oct. 5, meeting.
During Monday's meeting, the council approved a development agreement with Minot State University, agreed to a change to its snow removal ordinance and considered a new software contract.
The contract for updated asset management, permitting and licensing software and a second contract for the city's public-facing portal together are expected to increase from $129,409 this year to $198,708 by 2029, according to information provided to the council.
City Engineer Lance Meyer and Finance Director David Lakefield explained clients such as the city are being pushed to move from their own servers onto the providers' hosted cloud platforms.
"This is kind of getting to be the business model for software providers," Lakefield said. "We have tried to resist that as much as we can."
He said the city has a number of software applications on premise as well as some in hosted environments.
Council member Mike Blessum raised concern about security of data hosted on cloud-based services.
"That's actually why government is so incredibly lucrative to them," Blessum said. "They can set their price wherever they want, and they get to sell our data."
He supported resisting the cloud-based contracts as long as possible but admitted it will be unavoidable over time.
Council member Rob Fuller also cited the cost of the proposed contracts.
"In seven years, we will be paying $250,000 a year, a quarter million dollars a year, for this software. That is wasteful spending," he said. "I really believe that we need to direct the city staff to go back and see what else is out there."
Rather than approve the contracts for updated software, the council voted to continue with its older, existing software for another year. The city also plans to investigate its options with other software providers because its existing software eventually will be unsupported and no longer capable of security updates.
The council voted to approve a development agreement with MSU related to a $500,000 MAGIC Fund investment into the new innovation engineering program to enhance workforce in the region. The funding would enable MSU to apply for a $250,000 state match from the North Dakota Higher Education Challenge Grant. The council approved the agreement contingent upon MSU receiving the Challenge Grant.
Meanwhile, failure to remove snow and ice will become a code enforcement issue under an ordinance amendment approved by the council on first reading.
In response to community concerns, the city previously incorporated corrective actions, removed the abatement process and transitioned an offense to a criminal infraction in the snow removal ordinance. The updated ordinance now gives residents 72 hours rather than the previous 24 hours to remove snow on sidewalks and pedestrian curb ramps after a storm and sets a $150 penalty for failure to do so.
If approved on second and final reading, the latest change would authorize the city's code enforcement specialist to issue citations for violations.