Cotati City Council
Agenda Staff Report
Item type: CONSENT CALENDAR (ACTION)
To: City Council
Subject: Amendment to Contract with Rock Solid for Agenda and Legislative Management Software
Date: February 14, 2023
Written by: Damien O'Bid, City Manager
Recommendation
It is recommended that the City Council adopt a motion authorizing the City Manager to execute a contract amendment with Rock Solid to archive old meetings as part of its implementation of a new agenda and legislative management program.
Background
Beginning in early 2015, the City transitioned from a manual agenda process and meeting management to IQM2, a systemized agenda management, publishing and meeting management software system. As part of this transition, the City also did extensive improvements to begin live stream video broadcasts of City meetings. Over the intervening years, the City has built on this system, including adding a public access channel, live remote participation and numerous upgrades to various systems to better control what is now a complex broadcast system akin to a small television studio. While most of these systems are inward facing for agenda and meeting management, there are some elements that are public facing. These include elements such as the agenda view and speaker timer in meetings, the agenda webpage to view current and past meeting materials, agenda and board information page, as well as the “live stream”, which is the nonparticipatory video stream that goes out on the website and public access TV channel.
Over this time period, IQM2 has been purchased by various parent companies. While still supported for technical issues, the current owner has decided to stop development of the platform so that no new improvements are being made. Therefore, to address known issues and improve the public experience while searching for agenda materials, staff evaluated several leading agenda management systems to determine if transition to a new platform would improve functionality and usability for staff and the agenda search function for the public.
Analysis/Discussion
After evaluating numerous systems, the system that was determined to best meet these criteria was the Agenda Automation, Meeting Management and video streaming bundled in OneMeeting by “Rock Solid”. The public search tool was far better than competing products and will return contextual search results that enables the user to see a preview of materials in the search without having to download the entire document. The non-proprietary video feed leverages YouTube, a well-supported and stable video platform, and customer support is readily available outside of work hours when needed. Many cities use this system for agenda management, with the closest being the City of Petaluma.
As part of this transition, all of the old meeting records need to be migrated from the current site to the new meeting site. Initially, this was going to be completed by City staff, but upon further evaluation, it was determined that it would be far more cost effective to have Rock Solid perform the bulk of the content migration. This is particularly true when there are meeting videos, due to the extensive time required to download and upload these large videos. In these cases, it was found to be far more cost and time effective to utilize Rock Solid to perform this file migration. In older meetings with minutes only, City staff would still be able to complete those file migration efficiently. Migration work is needed to “go live” with the new system, so staff is recommending this split approach to get the new site ready. It is currently expected that the new system will be ready around the start of the new fiscal year (FY 23/24).
Financial Considerations
The additional cost of migrating the more intensive meeting records, including video, is approximately $12 per meeting. Given the number of meetings with associated video, it is recommended that the budget for this work be $3,700. With the other work already authorized, if approved by the City Council, the total contract cost with this amendment would be $28,700.
Given the City-wide nature of this system, costs are allocated across funds, including the special revenue funds for Public Education and Government Access (PEG) funds which are specifically reserved for government broadcasting operations and systems. The required funds are currently budgeted, so no additional appropriations of funds are required.
Environmental Issues
This action is exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) because it is not a project which has a potential for resulting in either a direct physical change in the environment, or a reasonably foreseeable indirect physical change in the environment, pursuant to CEQA Guideline section 15378.