Silicon Valley Budget Bodes Well for IT Work

A large Silicon Valley local government has set the stage for several potential technology upgrades.

The county government is in the developing opportunity stages of at least two IT initiatives following the recent approval of key documents.

County supervisors in Santa Clara County, Silicon Valley’s most populous county with about 2 million residents, unanimously approved an $11.5 billion 2022-2023 Fiscal Year budget on June 16. That budget includes more than $571 million in available one-time resources. Their vote, about two weeks ahead of the July 1 start of the 2022-2023 Fiscal Year, signals the emergence of several key technology projects. Among the takeaways:

• The Total Technology Needs area of the budget indicates $880,000 to replace desktops and monitors. More specifically, Santa Clara County Executive Dr. Jeffrey V. Smith made several recommended actions in the county’s budget. Among them, Smith recommended allocating “one-time funds” of $1.5 million for “services and supplies to replace desktops and laptops,” according to the budget. The recommended action would make use of “replacement reserves that were previously collected from county departments via end-user device service charges” and the purchase would be a one-time cost increase in services and supplies. It would “replace old desktops and laptops for county departments pursuant to replacement schedule.” In the Public Safety and Justice Office of the Sheriff area of the county’s adopted budget, Smith recommends spending $798,000 to “refresh desktops and monitors” and to “provide necessary technology to support existing services and infrastructure.” And in the Public Safety and Justice/Department of Corrections area of the budget, Smith recommends allocating $82,000 in one-time funds to refresh computer desktops and monitors and adding $21,000 in ongoing funding to “replace old and obsolete technology assets.”
• The budget further recommends spending $300,000 to modernize the crime lab information management system “to accommodate the enhanced capabilities of newly acquired toxicology instrumentation,” following the recommendation of the county’s executive.
  

All told, Santa Clara County’s adopted budget lists a little more than $28.2 million as its “total technology needs,” in a summary table that’s part of the “Available One-Time Resources and Allocations in the General Fund” section. As with the desktops and crime lab modernizations, timelines for procurements and projects are not stated. Among the allocations and needs, with rounding:

• $1.4 million for a “Mental Health Electronic Health Record.” In a somewhat related recommendation to the county Board of Supervisors (BoS), it’s recommended the board allocate $200,000 in one-time funding for the county Office of Education, to develop and implement training including for “electronic health systems billing software.”
• $1 million in one-time funds for an Assessment Appeals Data Management System. Here, the recommendation is for the one-time funds and $469,000 in ongoing funds for an “upgrade and ongoing maintenance of the Assessment Appeals Data Management system.”
• $8,000 in one-time funds for the Information Security Office. This is part of a larger recommendation that the BoS add one full-time senior IT security architect position, “allocate $629,000 in ongoing services and supplies funds,” and that $8,000. Ongoing cost for software maintenance, the recommendation notes, will rise by $370,000 after 2024.