2025-75 An Ordinance Adopting the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget

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database solution. When fully staffed, resources consist of 9 skilled IT resources- 1 administrative, 2 Application Support, 3 System Administrators, 1 Systems Analyst, and 2 Helpdesk/End User Support personnel. There are 9 budgeted IT resources in the IT department for Fiscal Year 2026. IT Director ( I 1 1 1 1 I I S 4-a ys: S Ad r Sys Admin Sys Admin Sys Admin Network Sup Spec Sr Net Sup f ;Dwa Sasei (Data/Servers) (Network/Security) (Police/Telecom) (Help Desk) (End User/Desktop) Systems Analyst Budget Highlights A) General Fund The proposed 2026 budget for IT consists of ongoing commitments to the support and operations of systems and solutions being used by City Staff. The following are areas of consideration in this budget outside of the usual: 1. The IT Department's General Fund expenditure continues to rise as inflation continues to increase. Services provided by vendors, for example, software and hardware maintenance bound by contracts, always stipulate a maximum their fees can increase year over year. Some are documented as a fixed percentage, and others are tied to CPI. Our contract annual increase allowances range between three and ten percent. I predict an average contractual obligation budget increase averaging about seven percent again in FY2026. 2. The City of Decatur utilizes virtual servers for the delivery of applications and virtual desktops both internally and externally. This highly effective and protected delivery model was a product of VMWare. In January 2025, this vendor was bought out by Broadcom and since then, our costs of utilizing this technology have nearly doubled increasing our costs to maintain this valuable asset. City IT will evaluate other technologies that can deliver these assets at a lower cost. 3. Salary and benefit costs have increased due to ever increasing benefit costs, salary market adjustments, and a slight increase with on-call pay governed by a new union contract. 4. Risk Management insurance continues to rise with one of the contributing factors being Cyber Security Liability Insurance. Damage to the city related to a cyber security breach can cost our organization millions of dollars. Annual costs of protecting ourselves are described in #8 of this document and continue to increase year over year. 5. The cost associated with software use and maintenance continues to grow due to the facts mentioned in #1 above as well as many vendors trying to control their versioning costs by developing "cloud" or software as a service 30