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The Roy City Council opted to wait to approve an accounting system upgrade that acting City Clerk-Treasurer Beth King as a must, not a want-to conversion.
King told the council during its Monday, Feb. 10, meeting that when the city’s computers were upgraded, staff found that its current BIAS 6 program is not compatible with Windows 11. In contacting Springbrook, the owner of the BIAS system, staff was informed that the system has stopped being supported for at least the past four years and is not going to be upgraded to work with Windows 11. Windows 10 has reached the end of its life and will stop receiving updates in 2025.
The city’s billing and accounts payable portions of the current BIAS program are extremely slow, King said, and are not working efficiently. King added that the scope of work would have taken less than a week to change over once the contract was signed. The estimated cost would have been no more than $18,200 annually to migrate the current BIAS 6 site-based program to the Springbrook Express 7 cloud-based system. King said Springbrook is giving the city discounts of up to 54% off their list price for new customers.
King said the cloud-based system has a higher degree of security than what is available and is backed up three times a day. With its current system, the city could potentially lose all of its records if the server is lost.
With only three council members in attendance, Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Starks and William Starks expressed concern that the current system should have been cloud based all along.
“The current system that (former city-clerk treasurer) Michael Malek recommended was supposed to be cloud based, according to his briefing, so now we’re saying that none of this information was saved on the cloud?” William Starks said.
King responded that she wasn’t around when the system was previously recommended, but she said the city is in a rare situation where it converted to Windows 11 before migrating to the upgraded system. She added that, if the contract would have been approved, the upgraded system would have included an app for residents to pay their utility bills electronically if they chose to for no charge to the customers.
Councilor Edmund Dunn showed support for approving the upgrades, telling Yvonne Starks and William Starks that the city doesn’t have much of a choice.
“It’s the same software, just a new version. It’s not like we’re changing systems to a new software package,” he said.
Yvonne Starks said she would rather wait until Mayor Kimber Ivy makes a move for the city to get a permanent city-clerk treasurer before training them on the new software, which King said would require minimal to no new training.
“I’m not ready to vote for it. I know we need it, but we also need for the mayor to make a move on us getting a permanent city-clerk treasurer. It’s been nine months, and it shouldn’t take that long to hire somebody,” she said. “I’m not ready to make a decision on this.”
In other council matters, King told the council that Roy received a payment for $84,830 from the Washington state Transportation Improvement Board for the 2021 overlay of Fourth and Peterson Street that the city was never reimbursed for.
The council also pre-approved a $6,000 grant to order additional lidar equipment for the Roy Police Department. Chief Paul Antista said he applied for the grant and was told he would hear back sometime this month and requested council approval so that the department wouldn’t have to wait another month to accept the grants if it received them. Lidar equipment is a laser-based device that police use to accurately measure the speed of vehicles.
King also provided an update from Public Works Director Ryan Fuller, telling the council that Well 1 went down with communication failure on Jan. 28. The public works department, along with Evergreen Rural Water, determined that there was internal failure in the pump motor and that the internal bearings needed to be replaced. Fuller made the decision to have the pump motor pulled and have repairs done, which he said was more cost effective to rebuild the motor than to replace it with just the bearings needing replacement and some machine work being done.
Third-party water quality testing on Well No. 2, which was contaminated with iron and manganese and has been operated while Well 1 was down, has been completed and the city is waiting for the completed results. The city is also waiting on the third round of testing completed by the city per the state Department of Health.
