City of Jackson’s new software comes with multi-million price tag

JACKSON, Tenn. — Tuesday morning, the Jackson City Council met and approved a contract for a new software that comes with a $2.8 million price tag.

“The city has a core financial software that we use to coordinate all the financial information between all departments in the city,” said Councilman Paul Taylor. “So we’ve been using something that’s really been outdated for about two decades.”

Taylor added, “I believe we budgeted about $800,000 for this first year of implementation, we won’t see near that much because of the time that we’re starting this implementation. So it’ll take two or three years to implement the software, and that total number is the seven years of fees included.”

But in addition to that cost, the city will pay over $300,000 dollars in recurring fees.

“If I was to ask for a financial report, it takes it takes one or two people hours to be able to generate that, and so this new software that we’ll have will take 15 seconds to be able to generate these reports that we need,” Taylor said.

The council also laid out the annual report for the budget and audit committee. They have been working to make progress and stay aware of where they stand in the budget.

“As we move forward, we’ll continue to look at, you know our financial transparency with the public, and on the accountability part.”

The council also approved a contract for their street resurfacing plan that will take on the end of this calendar year into the spring.

“Right now we have about $6 million allocated for that,” Taylor said. “This first contract was a little over $3 million, so that leaves us with about $2.9 million that we’ll have to look at another contract in the spring. And so this will be a significant, significant repaving plan, and we hope to kind of piggyback on that in the spring to continue the pavement.”

The council also approved a contract with West Tennessee Homeless Solutions to be the operator of the men’s homeless shelter. They are going to work alongside the City of Jackson to develop the building needs for their program.

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