By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
The city of Yachats should have a new website by July.
After almost a year of study and some controversy, the city of Yachats has signed a three-year contract with a Kansas company to design and rebuild the city’s website and technology systems and manage them for three years.
The new system will replace one mostly built and maintained for years by former City Council member Greg Scott and his contract programmers. The current system was increasingly expensive for the city to maintain and drawing more complaints from city staff and public over its reliability and difficulty of use.
The three-year contract with CivicPlus of Manhatten, Kansas will cost $12,633 a year. It includes redesigning the city’s website, rebuilding internet technology systems, transferring data and includes training, maintenance, support and hosting. Another part of the contract will cost $5,250 a year to build, implement and support a separate program so people or groups can directly schedule and pay for rooms and events in The Commons building. During the process CivicPlus and the city will still have to decide how to transition its financial programs, including how local businesses pay lodging or food and beverage taxes.
For the past five years the city has been spending $16,000 to $31,000 a year for database and website development, part of which was offset by $10,000 to $15,000 yearly donations from Scott and his wife, Nan.
CivicPlus is a 20-year-old company with 300 employees that specializes in developing web systems for local governments. It has worked with 3,500 clients during that time, including the Oregon cities of Dallas and Eugene.
While City Manager Shannon Beaucaire was reluctant to estimate a completion date, a timeline presented to the council Jan. 2 indicated the new system should be up and running by the end of June.
The city issued a request for proposal nationally last July. In part, the request said: “The overall goal is to redesign the website to improve citizen engagement, to increase communication, and to provide transparency of government, to incorporate current website technologies, all with simple navigation. The city also wants to continue integration of licensing and billing systems, a facilities reservation system, and an email/text notification system into the site.”
The city also wanted to slow increases in its technology costs and be able to get around-the-clock support, not relying on Scott as a volunteer or the limited availability of his part-time programmer in Corvallis.
The city got seven responses, which were narrowed to two finalists by a committee of city staff, citizens and outside technology experts. After more meetings and discussion, the council in November authorized Beaucaire to negotiate a contract with CivicPlus.
The current system was largely designed and built by Scott. In one memo to the council Scott estimated he spent at least 10 years and 10,000 hours volunteering his time on it.
But demands on the system by staff and public increased and complaints started piling up. Beaucaire started looking for solutions a few months after starting as city manager in October 2017.
Because Scott indicated he planned to respond to the IT proposal, the city excluded him from the planning process. That, he wrote in an email to the city, was the “tipping point” in resigning from the council last July and in September asking for – and getting — the return of a fiscal year 2018-19 donation of $15,000 donation made three weeks before he resigned. Scott told the city he wanted the money back because he no longer agreed with the direction of the IT program which it had supported.
To see a copy of the contract, go to: https://yachatsoregon.org/Documents/Download/2018-12-21_Civic_Plus_Agreement.pdf
To see a copy of the request for proposals, go to: https://yachatsoregon.org/Documents/Download/Yachats_2018_IT_RFP_FInal.pdf