Housing and Community Affairs Requests $4M for IT Capital Projects

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs (TDHCA) is requesting about $4 million for IT-related capital projects in its fiscal year 2028-29 Legislative Appropriations Request (LAR), with funding aimed at platform modernization, shared technology services, normal growth and financial system maintenance.

The department’s capital budget request totals about $4 million for the biennium and would be funded through appropriated receipts and federal funds, with no general revenue requested. The request is about $4.2 million lower than last session’s capital budget request, primarily because of a reduction in the number of capital budget projects.

The largest item is about $1.3 million for Department of Information Resources (DIR) Shared Technology Services, including disaster recovery, backups, cloud hosting, endpoint detection and response, external penetration testing, security information and event management and Microsoft 365.

According to the request, TDHCA uses shared technology services to back up production data to the state data centers. If a disaster destroys or disables the department’s server room, the agency says its data would be restored to DIR virtual servers and agency systems would be brought online in that environment.

The request also includes about $1 million for information resources normal growth. That item would support laptops and desktop computers for agency staff, upgrades to aging server hardware and software and evaluation of technology improvements intended to increase efficiency, security and end-user capabilities.

TDHCA is also seeking about $720,000 for PL/SQL platform modernization. The project would replace unsupported Oracle components with the Oracle REST Data Services gateway and a secure authentication framework. The agency says the work would improve long-term system stability, security and readiness for future capabilities such as multifactor authentication, single sign-on and modern application programming interface integrations.

Another about $906,000 is requested for Centralized Accounting and Payroll/Personnel System and PeopleSoft Financials maintenance. The funding would maintain TDHCA's annual support contract with the Comptroller of Public Accounts and support one full-time PeopleSoft position and one contract enterprise resource planning developer/project manager.

The LAR also lists a separate informational cybersecurity operations item of about $831,000 for the biennium. TDHCA says that funding would continue support for cybersecurity products and services as well as two existing cybersecurity positions. The department says it is not seeking to implement new solutions through that project.

The cybersecurity entry is intended to maintain vulnerability detection and management, enhanced endpoint protection, remote access security, application security, email security, data loss prevention, intrusion detection and event correlation, and network and endpoint security event monitoring by security operations center teams. The agency says it maintains sensitive customer information including personally identifiable information, sensitive personal information, protected health information and financial information.

The request also reflects statewide budget instructions requiring agencies to reduce base appropriation request levels by 3 percent. TDHCA says its general revenue request is down by about $1 million through administrative cost-saving measures and a method-of-finance swap from general revenue to appropriated receipts.

The department’s LAR does not show exceptional-item funding for the 2028-29 biennium.