The council heard from a few more departments during their Monday meeting, including from the Information Technology department and the city clerk.

Director of Information and Technology, Mark Dean, presented the IT budget, beginning with capital funds and other related items. The department’s budget includes two employees, and there are no equipment charges on the budget but there are telephone and internet charges.

“The bulk of it is maintenance agreements, dues and subscriptions, which are warranties for servers … some inventory software, antivirus renewal which includes firewall … protection for all computers,” Dean said.

Besides a few other charges for renewals and subscriptions, Dean also briefly discussed the travel and education section of the budget, some of which are mandated trainings, and online training for the two employees. From last year the total IT budget amount went down, he noted. It was also discussed that there is a potential for a decrease as well with the planned Board of Public Utilities fiber internet coming soon if the department was to take on that internet as a provider. The current internet provider is DFT.

City Clerk, Jennifer John, presents her department’s budget to the city council.

For City Clerk Jennifer John’s department, they have requested a $1,700 passport camera to allow them the ability to continue to provide passport pictures in the office.

“The one that we have is desperately trying to die on us but we’re trying to make it work as long as we can,” John said. “The revenue we collect from the photos will pay for that over a year. The one that we currently have I believe is seven to eight years old, so they do last for quite some time and there’s some regulations obviously for a passport photo, so that one’s kind of a necessity and we just wanted to plan for that.”

Besides that, John said she allowed for an increase for vendors in the budget, also talking salaries and storage of records, which are working on finding a new home in the basement of city hall. Some copies of records are required to have physical copies kept of them by the state, but others such as meeting minutes John said can be disposed of in about six years. The pricing to get them out of storage is also of note in the budget, and documents that get destroyed are not shredded by the company that stores and takes them out of storage, with John having to sign off on what gets destroyed. The department is looking to rehome some of the documents into a document room used by the Finance Department in the basement, so that in the down time in the summer they can go through and work on some of that disposal by state standards.

“Digitization is my dream, but I think that’s way down the road,” John said. “We’ve applied for grants and have not been successful yet.”

John also discussed revenues for the clerk’s department and dog violations with the council. A dog census was noted to not have been done in a long time, with licensing and registration renewals still coming in for the year.