Upgrade Financial & Budget Software for $179k - YES

Transparency was one of the main values I campaigned on in 2018, and it's at the core of everything we do at the Town Council. This vote was another step towards greater openness and transparency in Town finances, as we approved purchasing a new suite of budget and financial planning/reporting software for $178,890 from OpenGov that will allow for a much more easily accessible and digestible public budget.

This software will allow our Finance Department to work much more efficiently on many of their core activities, like budgeting and financial forecasting, saving taxpayer money. But perhaps even more exciting, it will allow us to create a publicly available budget document that is easily available, and understandable at a glance.

While we of course create public-facing budgets documents with our current software, residents from a non-finance background (myself included!) often find this confusing, and laborious to digest and understand. This new software fulfills our vision for a public budget that makes easy and simple for residents to follow every dollar, which I believe our community deserves. That is the true spirit of transparency!