The Columbus Board of Public Works and Safety approved an agreement with a government software provider that city officials say will help improve efficiency across two departments.
The board on Tuesday approved the agreement with OpenGov totaling $174,877 for three years of access to their software, which can be used for budgeting, permitting and licensing, procurement and various other municipal tasks.
The agreement specifies an annual subscription fee ranging from $35,580 in the first year in 2025 to $39,226 in the final year in 2027.
It also includes just under a $63,000 payment for professional services in the first year for product configuration, setup and training. Melissa Begley, assistant planning director, estimated it may take about six months to get all of their processes integrated into the OpenGov system.
The software will be used by the planning department, as well as community development, according to city officials.
Begley told board members that her department currently operates “very simply” in terms of how they track applications for the city board of zoning appeals and planning commission, as well as things like site plan reviews for new businesses.
Planning receives about 300 permits every year they have to review, which Begley said will be made easier through OpenGov. As of now, planning keep track of things by updating an Excel spreadsheet and logging information into Microsoft Access, per Begley.
“I think with this new permanent tracking software, a lot of it is seamless and integrated,” Begley said. “It’s going to save us a lot— it’s going to help us with efficiency and keeping track of things, (and) searching for things in the future.”
When asked by Board Member John Pickett why they landed on OpenGov outside of other vendors, Begley mentioned that it seemed to be “the most-user friendly,” and also came highly recommended by other cities including Fishers.
“They’ve been using it since 2019 and they all had good things to say about it,” Begley said.
Another benefit of the software, according to Begley, is that it can be easily used by those in the county.
“Because half of the work that we do is within the county, we need to be able to work with county counterparts— county highway, code enforcement, things like that,” Begley said. “This software will allow us to have them be able to access that information.”
Begley said other vendors would have required the county to also purchase a subscription. Because OpenGov is cloud-based, the county can just be added as an additional user.
Begley also mentioned that OpenGov will help with sharing larger file sizes— planning and other departments have had issues doing so through the city’s Dropbox, she said.
Community development will mostly be using OpenGov for code enforcement, Paul Smith, assistant director of community development, said. Smith told the board that based on their research, OpenGov is the “premier code enforcement software.”
“It’s really effective at tracking everything that code enforcement does,” Smith said. “Fred (Barnett) has been trying to cobble together different systems to try to manage and then track all that, and it’s been essentially impossible to get accurate data on the things that he does and how he does it, but also to maintain tracking with the different incidences and things like that,” Smith said.
Begley said when planning begun taking a look at OpenGov, they were unaware that community development was interested in the same software.
“It just so happened we landed on the same software,” Begley told board members. “And there’s a benefit— we got a little bit of a price break for both going in together.”
