Council approves $80,000-a-year priority-based budgeting contract to build program-based budget

Council approved an amendment to a Tyler Technologies agreement to add a priority-based budgeting module intended to help the city reorganize line-item budgets into program-based budgets and generate analytical scoring to support long-range fiscal decisions.

City Manager Doug Schultz and budget manager Paul Walladez described the procurement as sole sourced and explained how the software will import the adopted FY27 budget from the citys Munis system, map expenditures into program groupings via an AI model, and provide a platform for director review and scoring. Schultz characterized the vendor solution as a closed, municipal-focused ML product rather than a general-purpose public chatbot: "The AI that is used here isn't like chat, GTP, Perplexity, Gemini, those global AI's. This is a is a smaller pool," he said, describing an inventory-and-validation workflow that requires finance and department directors to validate program mappings.

Council members raised questions about training data, procurement process (public commenters asked whether local firms had been considered), and timeline for delivering usable program-based budgets. Staff committed to follow-up briefings, said the adopted FY27 budget will be the starting dataset and that the tool will support building the FY28 program budget. The council voted unanimously to proceed and asked staff to return with a project timeline and the adopted budget materials to be posted publicly.