Katy council approves contract to modernize municipal court records, pays $25,000 implementation fee and $25,000 annual maintenance

The Katy City Council voted to authorize the mayor to sign a master services agreement with a vendor to implement a new case-management system and perform data conversion for Katy Municipal Courts.

Council members were told the one-time implementation and conversion cost is $25,000 and the annual maintenance fee is $25,000, meaning about $50,000 in the first year. Municipal-court staff clarified that the quoted maintenance covers hosted services and that the contract does not require the city to buy additional personal computers or servers.

Council members asked whether the courts would need to re-create existing forms or re-enter records during the migration. A vendor representative, Melton of LT Systems, said the vendor would use the courts’ existing forms where possible and expected that conversion runs might need to be repeated until the data balanced: “We’ll make those corrections and we’ll just usually by the third time, we’ve got a good clean run,” Melton said. Municipal-court staff added the courts became “paper light” in 2014 but said the new system may allow further reductions in paper usage.

Officials also discussed notification costs. Staff said the city’s prior system (Encode) had a lower base price but did not include text-notice charges; text messages for defendant notices cost about $0.10 each, and when text fees are included the city’s annual expense is roughly $25,000.

Council members pressed on interoperability with police systems. A vendor representative described the new product as using REST application programming interfaces to synchronize with the police citation system (the Tyler product referred to as Brazos), polling every five minutes to import new citations, citation images and photographs automatically.

After vendor and staff answers, the council approved the resolution. The motion was recorded in the minutes as made by Council Member Follett and seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Tim Hicks; the chair called the vote and the motion carried.

The agreement authorizes the mayor to finalize and sign the master services agreement and related implementation and data-conversion documents. The council did not provide a detailed vote tally in the public transcript and no implementation start date was specified in the reading.