2025-75 An Ordinance Adopting the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget

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(SAS) solution in leu of continuing development of solutions that run on local city servers (hosted at the city). Vendors are sunsetting solutions hosted locally and only provide SAS as a go forward strategy to control their costs but that comes at an additional cost for the city. The overall cost of use and maintenance for these solutions increases costs considerably due to the cost of leasing infrastructure in addition to use and software maintenance fees. The largest contributor to escalating software costs is our DB2 replacement project. We have been converting old legacy DB2 applications into other solutions owned by the city. Every solution has implementation hours and possibly licensing fees to get them moved to our existing solutions. 6. As the city ramps up its website and web presence, it has become necessary to contract skilled webmaster resources to keep our website meaningful, current, and ever new. Professional service dollars have been earmarked in the IT general budget to assist with this again in 2026. As stated last year, as the city website continues to develop and become more and more of a resource to citizens, the city will likely need to look into a full-time resource for website development and support. 7. The IT department budgeted some Large Capital in FY2026, supporting our continuing effort with data interoperability and streamlining organizational workflows. A new software solution from Tyler Technologies is being recommended by financial management to automate and manage the bidding process for both city staff and vendors who will have an external portal to electronically send in bid packages. A sizable expenditure is required to replace our current phone system in FY2026 when Cisco sunsets our current system and will not offer further security updates. Some funding is recommended to replace some of our power protection for servers in the server room which are aged and approaching the end of their useable life. 8. Local governments, large and small, continue to face increasing Cyber threats because of being connected to and use of the World Wide Web (Internet). The City IT Department continues to be on high alert regarding protecting city systems and data assets. Filters and gateway appliances report and mitigate thousands of risks daily. With the adoption of the FY2026 General Fund Budget, it should be noted that the City of Decatur will be spending $181,718 annually on Data Network Security. With the introduction of computer-based Artificial Intelligence (Al), the number of cyber threats and hacking attacks continue to increase. The combination of Al and Cyber Threat actors is a very dangerous combination. 9. All other expense categories in FY2026 are anticipated to remain reasonably flat or decrease in spending compared to FY2025. 31