MANSFIELD — Finance Director Kelly Blankenship recognized the City of Mansfield’s financial software system when she took office 11 months ago.
That’s because it’s largely the same system the city was using when she left that office in 2011.
That will change with the City Council decision on Tuesday night to spend $510,271 over the next five years on a new Oracle NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning system.
The initial bulk of that price will be paid by $250,000 from the city’s remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds.
In the past decade, Blankenship said, Tyler Technologies, the company which now owns the system, has not kept pace with the kind of upgrades needed in today’s municipal finance environment.
“We have had increasing problems with Tyler, being unresponsive to our requests for assistance … downtime with the system … it is no longer efficient. It doesn’t serve our purposes.
“It’s not being upgraded or advanced in any kind of way and the pricing keeps increasing 5 to 6 percent every year,” Blankenship said.
“We’ve had numerous problems with (the system), especially the utility billing module and them promising upgrades to (us) that that we purchased and the implementation has taken more than a year for the upgrade in utilities and it’s still not functional to where it should be,” she said.
Blankenship said the office pulled together a team that included city engineer Bob Bianchi and Mark Huckleberry, operations supervisor at the city’s 911 communications center, to analyze and review other software systems.
They eventually settled on Oracle, one of the world’s largest technology companies based in Austin, Texas.
“Oracle is a massive company, but they’re moving into the public sector now. They have offerings for larger-size public entities, but now they’re trying to get to the smaller and mid-size like (Mansfield).
“When we saw their product demo, it was just mind-blowing the efficiency that it could bring to us here,” Blankenship said.
“They were kind of like the standard that we measured all the other competitors against and nobody seemed to have a software system as robust as what Oracle NetSuite has to offer us,” the finance director said.
“We chose Oracle simply because their system was so robust and it’s fully customizable,” she said. “We will realize some efficiencies that we don’t enjoy now and it’ll be like stepping out from being in a cave into the 21st century,” she said.
She said the increasing fees being paid to Tyler Technologies each year would help to cover the cost of the new program and will actually begin reducing costs in the third year.
Blankenship said it will take about a year to implement the new Oracle system.
“We are hoping to go live in January 2026,” she said.
In other activity on Tuesday, City Council:
— voted to amend city ordinances related to “off-street” parking.
— voted to amend city ordinances regarding “street obstructions and special uses.”
— voted to adopt personnel positions, pay grades and salaries for selected city employees, often raising the starting/lowest wage in many of the positions.
— voted to approve a sponsorship support partnership agreement between Brightspeed and the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
— voted to approve “consent legislation” to allow the Ohio Department of Transportation on city-owned streets during an upcoming improvement project on Ohio 13.
— voted to approve to work at the south side of the Woodland Reservoir to remove Trihalomethanes (THMs), a byproduct of the water treatment process. The underground reservoir near Cook and Woodland roads consists of two, underground six-million gallon tanks through which most of the city’s water supply runs.
THMs are formed when natural organic material, such as the decaying vegetation commonly found in lakes and reservoirs, reacts with chlorine used to treat the water. This reaction produces “disinfection byproducts,” the most common of which are THMs.
The work, funded through the water treatment plant, will install surface aerators such as those placed in the north reservoir in 2018. These aerators will mix air into the water, allowing the THMS to release into the air.
The work will be done in the spring/summer of 2025, according to Bianchi.
