Technology Review Board proposes $2.8M in IT projects; commissioners weigh election equipment reserve

The Technology Review Board presented an aggregated list of IT decision packages and a recommended onetime envelope of roughly $2.8 million for new projects and replacements.

James Arndt, the county’s infrastructure representative, said the data-center maintenance request will sustain storage, virtual servers, redundant connectivity and licensing in the county’s secure colocation facility. "This funding helps sustain the core service required to keep that environment secure, stable, and fully operational," he said.

TRB outlined multiple priority items: planned replacement of servers and storage that support the sheriff’s office and 911 Tyler CAD/RMS applications (vendor support ends in 2027), a child sexual-abuse material (CSAM) identification workflow to speed and secure media review for the district attorney, a records-management replacement for the clerk, routine PC and iPad replacement lines and a consumable inventory-management system to help EMS and other departments track time-sensitive supplies.

The board also recommended renewing the county’s Gov AI pilot so staff can continue using a government-only model for internal queries that keep county data from being used to train public large language models. TRB members noted several projects were deprioritized for lack of one-time funding; an RFI response for an appraiser commercial-market application was cited at about $450,000 as an example of an expensive, high-benefit item that did not make the cut this cycle.

Commissioners asked whether some TRB funding should be preserved for election equipment, and several suggested reserving $3–4 million to start building an elections equipment fund ahead of a multiyear replacement schedule. TRB staff agreed to provide more detail and follow up on prioritization notes and formal cost estimates for top projects.