Supervisors praise IT amid growing tech expenses

When it rolls around to budget season in Wisconsin counties, a lot of the conversation swirls around roads and payroll and sheriff’s department needs, and that’s nearly always the case in Oneida County, too.

But much of the really substantive discussion — the nuts and bolts of what is needed to keep the county running day-to-day — isn’t about the headline-making departments; it’s about accounting and land information and maintenance needs.

And maybe none are more important than deliberations over firewalls, software licensing, and artificial intelligence, namely, the technology requirements and upgrades every county must have in this day and age, and that was the case, too, last week in Oneida County. 

For the better part of an hour, supervisors on the county’s executive committee dove deep into the proposed 2026 budget of the Information Technology Services (ITS) department, line by line, along the way questioning why technology costs keep rising even as officials tout savings and efficiency.

In the end, the department contributed substantially to the county’s ability to erase a $1-million overall general fund deficit at the beginning of the hearings to emerge by week’s end with a proposed balanced budget. 

(At its next meeting, the county board will entertain a proposal for a tax levy of $18,972,968, up 3.7 percent from last year’s levy of $18,291,822. However, the tax rate would drop to $1.44 per $1,000 of equalized value from last year’s $1.52, or a decrease of 5.3 percent. A full budget story will appear next week.)

For starters, before even entering the hearings, the ITS department had kicked in $100,000 from its continuing appropriations funds to cover 2026 costs. 

After deliberating with ITS director Jason Rhodes early in the budget hearings, supervisors formally reduced the operations budget by $100,000 more, affirming the move of a software migration expense from operations to capital improvements, a separate county funding category.

Then, in an exchange reminiscent of card game banter, the committee decided to make $65,000 more in changes, with Rhodes proposing to “split the difference” after executive committee chairman Billy Fried mused about how much the county could get to offset its overall deficit. 

Ultimately, in addition to the software migration reduction of $100,000, supervisors reduced the contract programming services line item by $35,000 and added an additional $30,000 to the continuing appropriation hardware/software maintenance revenue line item.

Overall, the budget hearing changes left the ITS department showing a deficit for the year of $2,108,819, down from $2,273,819 in the proposed budget.

Despite the deficit — not uncommon in the IT world — the exchanges were cordial throughout the day and at times humorous, as supervisors praised Rhodes and his team.

“I’m very proud of what you guys have been able to do to support us,” Fried said. “You’ve had some challenges with staffing, and you’ve kept the county, as well as the individual supervisors, moving forward. … We’re pretty impressed with what you’ve been able to do up here in our corner of Wisconsin.”

On the other hand

That said, Fried noted that rising technology costs have led to increased though normal scrutiny of the department. For his part, Rhodes emphasized the budget moves the department had already made coming into the hearing. 

“I had already put in, under the revenue portion, $100,000 from our continuing appropriations to help offset the increase that we’re seeing this year,” Rhodes said. “Overall spending from last year to this year is a difference of about 1 percent, but our ask from last year to our ask for this year, the difference is about 7 percent.” 

In other words, Rhodes said, to soften the anticipated budget increase, his department tapped $100,000 in the department’s ongoing set-aside funds to offset new costs for the year. Finance director Tina Smigielski said the department was applying $50,000 each from two continuing appropriations accounts.

She also said that one of those accounts had a pot of nearly a quarter-million dollars in it — $245,000 in earmarked funds for the county’s land information system, a GIS-based program that manages tax, zoning, and mapping data.

At the heart of that project is the migration from the county’s outdated IMS21 imaging system to a new platform called Laserfiche — a move affecting the treasurer’s office, planning and zoning, and land records.

IMS21 had become a budgetary albatross, Rhodes said. 

“They more or less quadrupled our price per year, and we’re like, we can’t do this,” he said. “They hit us with that last year out of the blue. We scrambled. We went unsupported for six or seven months.”

Rhodes said the company eventually dropped the renewal to around $20,000, but the department started looking for alternatives and found Laserfiche, which would cost roughly the same. 

During the meeting, Rhodes ticked off several other cost-saving measures he said the department has implemented to contain long-term expenses. For example, Rhodes said for years the county relied on Adobe Pro software, once sold as a perpetual license. 

“It used to be we could buy it and we would own that license and we can move it from person to person to person,” he said. “They’ve since changed that. They’ve increased the price of it and changed it to you pay every year. We found another solution just as good and we’ve been installing that for people for about a quarter of the price and, again, we own that. It’s not a yearly. So we’re constantly looking for savings like that so that we can try to keep our asks as low as we can.”

Unfortunately, Rhodes said, that wasn’t the case in the coming year.

“This year we were higher, so we did try to compensate with our continuing appropriations and move $100,000,” he said. “We were asked long ago to start our continuing appropriations and keep them going so that when we come to you every year, we’re not looking for service for things in our normal operating budget.”

Rhodes said ITS earmarks those continuing appropriations for projects such as modernizing phone systems and upgrading the county’s firewall, both of which protect critical infrastructure from outages and cyberattacks. 

Next year, he said, the department plans to begin replacing core network switches — the backbone of the county’s data system — over a four-year period stretching from 2027 through 2030.

“We’ve tried to be prudent in what we’re looking at and have that money available so that we can do those projects and keep us safe and secure and on new equipment,” he said. “Most of our equipment dates back to 2016 or 2017. By 2026, we’ll be running on nine- or ten-year-old equipment. We’re trying to stay current, confident, and secure.” 

Microsoft 365 migration

The county’s biggest single software change is its planned move to Microsoft 365, part of a multi-year project that was already approved for the capital improvement projects (CIP) budget in concept. Moving that expenditure to CIP formally would remove $100,000 from the department’s operations levy.

Rhodes clarified that $100,000 was different from the $100,000 being moved into revenues from continuing appropriations: “That would be in addition,” he said. “I am not swapping them out.”

Specifically, that would reduce a software maintenance expenditure line item from $658,192 to $558,192.

Fried wanted to know if that line item could be reduced by more, and, if not, why not?

The answer from Rhodes was no: “Because going to the Office 365 will continue to be a year-to-year cost to us, $110,000. If we stay where we’re at, we’re at $202,000 for every three years. If we go to the Office 365, we’re down to approximately $110,000 for the services. So if we go down more, I won’t have the money to pay for the new software.”

Fried asked if Rhodes would lose sleep over the $100,000 reduction.

“No, I think that’s the right way for us to go,” he said. “We have upgraded software, and it happens every year. We won’t be behind the eight ball again. It will be hosted. It should give a whole lot more functionality to all of the departments including the board, as you can get into Office 365 from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”

As for the continuing appropriations accounts originally targeted for $50,000 reductions in each, they would still be in relatively robust shape.

One of those accounts, the Infotech Services account, carried $316,642, while the companion account for hardware and software maintenance held $299,264. Removing the $50,000 from each reduced the former account to $266,642 and the latter to $149,000 after planned draws for firewall and phone upgrades.

The committee later increased the take from hardware and software maintenance budget by an additional $30,000.

”Please keep in mind, I am hitting those accounts this year for the phone project and firewall upgrades, and we are starting the virtual services platforms, which is our core switch replacement as soon as I can get stuff ordered,” Rhodes said.

That remaining money is earmarked, the IT director said.

“It was my intention to do the switches all from continuing appropriations, and we started looking into it and getting actual real numbers now that we’re that close, and that’s why I put in the CIP for the 2027 through 2030 for the switch replacements, but I need to actually be starting that in 2026,” he said. “It also ties hand in hand with the other CIP for the migration from HSD (Human Service Department) for their new switches. Those new switches would make them compatible with what we currently have and with what we’re operating to.”

Centralized Printing

In a less glamorous but no less vital category, the committee turned to printing costs.

“There’s a central copier which we lease for $75,000 in the budget,” Smigielski said. “Once we centralized all of that, that’s all in the IT budget. It’s not being charged back to the firm.”

IT monitors usage through quarterly reports.

“Every quarter we get billed for overages on printing,” Rhodes said. “I splurged a little bit today and printed in color, but we get charged for overages on those things. We do get a quarterly report of the heaviest hitters, but we generally do not charge back to any of the departments. They’re free to print. If we see somebody who really goes nuts, we do talk to them.”

The system, he added, doesn’t yet include the Human Service Department, which still operates under a separate vendor. Once that contract expires, it too will move under IT’s umbrella.

“That does not include anything for the HSD at this point, which we will have to lease more printers for them after their contract runs out with [the vendor],” he said. “So we’re kind of hoping to make sure that we have the funds available to do that without coming back to the board and saying, ‘Hey, we need more money to get the new printers.’”

Ultimately, the board approved the motion to amend the budget by $165,000.

Not quite the Socratic method

Along the way, supervisors stuck their toes slightly into philosophical waters. One supervisor, looking at the yawning departmental deficit and yearly technology cost increases, wondered why technology costs never seem to stabilize.

Rhodes said part of the problem is that vendors have switched to a rent-forever model. The move to cloud and subscription software — “software as a service” — has turned predictable capital costs into rolling operating expenses. 

“A lot of times our upgrades will then require us to yearly have something else expended,” he said. “That seems to be where technology is going. We no longer own it. We’re now leasing it — or software as a service that they’re calling that — because that’s a lot more profitable for the vendors and a lot harder on us.”

Experts have cited other reasons for inexorably rising technology costs. For one, technology costs don’t behave like typical budgets because they have three- to five-year cycles, and, when replacements are needed, costs can spike.

Governments also tend to be locked into legacy systems: decades-old software that connects to tax databases, courts, or human-services programs. Personnel shortages have also taken their toll, and cybersecurity has turned out to be a never-ending money pit.

The other philosophical moment concerned artificial intelligence (AI) when supervisor Rob Jensen asked, “Where is AI potentially going to take us?”

Rhodes said AI was the biggest thing happening at the moment, but not in Oneida County. 

“We’ve had many requests, ‘Hey can we use ChatGPT, can we use this?’” he said. “And I keep telling them no. Right now I am banning it from our networks. It is not safe. It’s not secure.”

It’s not even accurate at this point, Rhodes said. 

“Using it in those capacities because it’s kind of like Wikipedia, well, anybody can go out there and say, ‘oh yeah, Truman is still alive and he’s doing well,’ so you put that in Chat, and you can come back and that’s going to be in there.”

Rhodes said there were several iterations of AI.

“There’s one, they’re going out and writing proposals and bids and requests for proposals and you can come back with three different things from three different search engines and they’re all going to be wrong or some of them might be right,” he said. “It has got to be taken with a grain of salt but people aren’t using it properly.”

Rhodes said it was also a security risk.

“Once you submit something to it, you don’t have that data in your possession anymore,” he said. “It’s now out in the world for other people to take as well. There’s also other parts of it where they can sneak in hacking attempts. When they return your information, you click on it, and damn, you’re hit.” 

Richard Moore is the author of “Dark State” and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.