That the City Council approve and authorize the City Manager to execute a three-year agreement in the amount of $18,000 per year with TPx for telecommunication services.

In October 2019, the City switched from Windstream Communications to TPx through a competitive bid process for telecommunication services.  TPx service has proven to be highly reliable with only one system outage the past two years.  In June 2021, TPx advised the city that the 1.5 megabytes per second (Mbps) copper circuit used to provide telecommunication services to the City is going to be decommissioned by May 2022.  Staff has since worked with TPx to identify other options for consideration.  As a result, staff recommends the migration of the City's existing 1.5 Mbps copper circuit to a 5.0 Mbps fiber optic cable, resulting in a $300 monthly increase in cost.  Although the cost will be marginally higher, this upgrade will provide a significant increase in bandwidth as well as the reliability and scalability offered by fiber optic cable versus a traditional copper circuit.

The City's current annual telecommunication cost is $14,400.  If approved by the City Council, this annual cost is estimated to increase by $3,600 per year, for a total of $18,000 per year.  The City's telecommunication costs are shared proportionally between the General Fund and other non-General Fund operating budgets.