Portage moves to consolidate information technology bills

The Portage Board of Works Tuesday approved contracts to clean up the city’s large information technology bills and update access to information on the city.

City officials still are trying to figure out why they’re paying about $400,000 a year to at least three vendors to handle phone services, Internet access, software and hardware needs, so paying Impact Networking, of Lake Forest, Ill., $5,000 to do it for them makes sense, said Mayor John Cannon.

The city is paying as much as $100,000 a month just for phone service at City Hall, with some phones probably never being used, Cannon said. The Clerk-Treasurer’s and mayor’s offices use two separate Internet providers, incurring two separate bills he said.

That $400,000 a year bill is scheduled to go up another 10 percent next year, Cannon said.

“That’s why we had to do something” he said. “(Impact Networking) will do an assessment on what actually we need, what’s not needed, how many users we have, equipment they may not need and give us a report to see if we need to renegotiate.

“We want to try to get all of that under one umbrella.”

The city also will follow the police department’s lead in getting a mobile app anyone can use to get information about Portage on their phones, Cannon said. For now, information seekers have to go to the city’s web sites.

The board approved paying a consultant $5,000 per year each to produce the apps for the city and the police department. That amount is down from the roughly $20,000 annually the city would have paid had only the city or the police department bought the app, Cannon said.

In other business, the board agreed to renew a 30-year lease on a 65-feet by 90-feet concrete pad for a cell phone tower with GTP Acquisitions. Portage began the lease with GTP in 1999, and, it’s set for renewal in 2024, said city attorney Gregg Sobkowski.

Along with a $50,000 signing fee, GTP will pay Portage $17,490 annually to rent the spot, and, the lease amount will rise by 15 percent every sixth year of the contract, Sobkowski said.