City Council cancels copier compromise

Council walks back deal to spend $52,000 on copiers, printers

WOONSOCKET — Reversing itself, the City Council on Monday killed any hope City Hall might have had for replacing its outmoded copying machines this fiscal year, canceling the no-bid deal members had approved about three weeks earlier.

The 6-0 vote to bury a roughly $52,000 contract with Aztec Office Supplies saw four members – James C. Cournoyer, Denise Sierra, David Soucy and John F. Ward – change their vote. Voting against the contract for a second time were Council President Dan Gendron and Councilman Roger G. Jalette Sr.

“Clearly this was a good offer under a sale program, but it does really fly in the face of the requirement for transparency and even-handedness that we try to assure the public and our vendors that we will follow in making purchases,” Ward said.

Aztec would have provided 10 copiers for City Hall with free printers under a promotional offer that the city could have taken advantage of due to its purchasing partnerships with the state. Ward said competitive bidding almost always results in a better deal than such offers.

Though some of the city’s copiers are said to be over a decade old, Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s plan for replacing them got a chilly reception from the council from the outset.

There were a series of votes on it cast by the council on Dec. 21 – one to approve the contract with Aztec and another to capture the funds to pay for it from a roughly $1.1 million contingency fund. During that meeting, councilors voted 5-2 to approve the contract,

but denied the administration the transfer on a 6-1 vote, citing the looming fiscal uncertainties of the pandemic on next fiscal year’s budget.

If the city wanted the copiers, members said the administration may try to find savings elsewhere in the existing budget to buy them. Additionally, in comments they reaffirmed on Monday, councilors said the city should have known for some time that such copiers, as old as they are, needed to be replaced and, therefore, the funds to do so should be part of a routine capital replacement in an ordinary budget, not an expense drawn from an emergency contingency.

Despite the council’s efforts to safeguard the contingency for COVID-19’s rainy day, members did approve an unrelated request by the administration to make a roughly $107,000 withdrawal from the fund on Monday.

The council voted 6-0 to approve that request, which will pay the PowerSchool company to upgrade and maintain the accounting software that underpins the financial operations of municipal government. PowerSchool is providing a new generation of software to replace SunGard, an operating system that will no longer be supported by regular program updates, which means it’s basically obsolete. The successor software is called eFinancePlus.

Ward suggested there was ample time for the city to budget for the demise of SunGard, since news of its sunset was first circulated around the third quarter of 2019. But members supported the administration’s request, albeit with some reluctance.

“We don’t have a choice,” said Cournoyer. “We do have to move and upgrade the system.”

But Cournoyer stressed the importance of continuing to protect what’s left of the contingency – or isn’t. He says it already appears to have been mostly spoken for.

A recently-approved, twoyear collective bargaining agreement with Local 404 of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers will claim about $750,000 of it and overtime will claim perhaps another $350,000 in unbudgeted expenses, the councilman said.

“There’s more than a million right there, out the door,” Cournoyer said.