The Cass County Commission voted unanimously May 20 to approve Resolution 2649, authorizing agreements with The Hunter Group LLC to provide collector software licensing, data migration and related services for the county tax-collection system.
County staff member Mr. Mullendor described the procurement process and recommended the Hunter Group after one potential bidder declined to submit. "We're going to move this to the cloud, and those old AS/400 boxes will be gone," Mr. Mullendor said, outlining planned changes that include text-message and email billing, online credit- and debit-card payments that generate immediate receipts, and a bookkeeping change to add vehicle identification numbers to paper receipts at the Department of Revenue's request.
Mr. Mullendor told the commission the project will migrate about 26 years of tax data and that the county expects a go-live date of Aug. 1, 2026. He said ending the county's hosting agreement with Huber will free monthly funds. "We're going to make a lot of dramatic improvements," he said, and added that forthcoming state legislation (referred to in the meeting as "Senate Bill 3 or Senate Bill 190") increases the need for a more flexible system.
The commission approved the resolution by voice vote, recorded in the meeting as three votes in favor and zero against. The resolution authorizes the software licensing and data migration agreements; the motion and second were recorded on the public docket but individual mover/second names were not specified in the transcript.
Why it matters: The change replaces long-running legacy systems (referred to in the meeting as AS/400 servers) with a cloud-hosted platform, alters how property taxpayers can pay bills, and consolidates decades of historical tax records in a new vendor system. County staff framed the project as necessary to meet both operational expectations for online payments and to accommodate likely future state rule changes.
Next steps: The contract was approved and staff described an August 1 go-live target. The commission did not record additional implementation milestones in the public portion of the meeting; follow-up reports to the commission are expected to appear in future staff updates.