Pulaski County will continue to contract out IT services. During Monday’s joint session with the county council, the county commissioners voted to hire Roeing IT Solutions.
The company’s first step will be to evaluate the county’s existing IT system, according to County Attorney Kevin Tankersley. “Basically, they said, ‘Your IT is so discombobulated that we need to spend 80 hours to give you a proposal about how to fix it,’ So that’s going to cost you $11,000 out of the gate,” Tankersley said. “But after that, you’re going to have a game plan, a map, ‘Here’s what you need to do. Here’s what you have that you don’t need. Here’s what you need to replace.’”
Auditor Laura Wheeler said the county will be able to cover that cost with money from this year’s budget. But Tankersley noted that the $11,000 doesn’t include the cost of actually buying the new equipment. “So it sounds like you might spend – I don’t know, I’m totally ballparking – but $50,000 to get you back up to where you would be in a position where they would then offer you a maintenance contract,” Tankersley said. “They said they wouldn’t even offer you a maintenance contract right now. They can’t maintain what you have.”
Tankersley said that once the county’s IT equipment is up-to-date, Roeing would charge the county $40,000 to $50,000 a year for IT services. He said that’s less than the other proposal the county received and far less than the cost of hiring an in-house IT director. “The general consensus, I think, was that to hire somebody, an individual, as a county employee, that had the expertise necessary or that was even comparable to the people that work for this company, they’d be the highest-paid employee, by far, in this county,” Tankersley explained. “They’d make $125,000 a year, to get that kind of a person. They have those types of people working for them. They said, ‘We have those people. You just don’t need them all the time.’”
The commissioners had also advertised for an in-house IT director, but Auditor Wheeler said no one applied. The commissioners noted that Roeing has over 50 employees, with some of them based in Logansport. The company promised to have someone available at all times.
Council Member Ken Boswell said that while all of those costs might seem expensive, it will be worth having an actual plan. “We do too much of this just trying to cover it with what we can, and it takes a lot of time and dedication,” he said. “We think $11,000 sounds like a lot of money to make a roadmap. That’s damn cheap. Excuse my language.”
Roeing will officially take over from the county’s current IT contractor, DeGroot Technology, at the end of January. The commissioners said Willie DeGroot has agreed to continue serving as a consultant after the changeover is complete.
