The ongoing dispute over sales tax money the City of Bloomington and Town of Normal are sharing with McLean County government has additional layers of tension and uncertainty.
A great deal of the public focus so far has been on the unspent mental health money in the Mental Health and Public Safety fund. Another approved use of money from the decade-old agreement is to replace an aging electronic record management system that integrates information for the courts, law enforcement, and other stakeholders. There has been a lot of unhappiness about that project too.
The aging suite of programs called the county's Electronic Justice System, or EJS, has tied together 14 McLean County police agencies, prosecutors, court services, circuit clerk, juvenile probation, and the coroner’s office with a common set of records and access. It also uses software that’s no longer supported and contains security vulnerabilities.
The process to replace it started a few years after the parties signed the sales tax sharing agreement. All stakeholders acknowledge it hasn't gone well.
“This was years in the making. And a year longer than it probably should have been,” said McLean County Sheriff Matt Lane.
Caliber
Lane said 18-24 months is the industry standard to a new system up and going. This took five years. Some of that delay was from the pandemic. Some of that was the challenge of getting many stakeholders together and coordinating deliberations. Lane said some of the delay is on the county.
Normal Police Chief Steve Petrilli said complicating the issue was a second big data and software project. The county move to a computer-aided dispatch program, or CAD, through a different vendor.
“In an ideal world we wanted the RMS and the CAD to go live at a similar time and in a very short timeframe because those two systems are developed to integrate with one another to create operational efficiencies for law enforcement and fire folks that may be using those. But some of the delays that were experienced through the RMS project ultimately delayed the CAD implementation as well,” said Petrilli.
It's not simple.
The stakeholders picked the same vendor to do the new system they had for EJS, a firm called Caliber. The idea was that Caliber already had experience with county data and the needs of the courts, police, prosecutors, and so on. Petrilli said there have been problems.
“Just the overall functionality of the Caliber RMS system. There’s a litany of issues, most of them revolving around data migration,” said Petrilli.
Sheriff Lane agreed.
“I like the way Caliber is responding right now. They weren’t responding well during the testing phase, in the correction, and in the adjustment phase before we could get this thing to go live. I think it delayed quite a few things,” said Lane.
WGLT obtained a report from consulting firm Mission Critical Partners through the Freedom of Information Act as part of its reporting on another story. The report dealt with the deep dissatisfaction of stakeholders in the RMS replacement process.
The MCP report noted while Caliber offers some modern features, “the new solution falls short on critical functions like legal integration and service of process.”
There are other reasons for the significant level of frustration by law enforcement.
“Confidence in the Caliber vendor is low due to poor communication, misleading promises of customization, mass data migration problems, and unprofessional interactions with agency staff,” said the report.
No one heading up key departments now has ever been through a huge changeover in record management systems. Lane pointed out it could be EJS wasn’t a smooth startup back-when either. He said he doesn’t know how smooth any company would be.
“It’s just like anything else. You have salespeople that tell you this can be done. Then you have the people that actually write the programs and boots on the ground, and it sometimes can be done and sometimes can’t,” said Lane.
That said, there's broad agreement Caliber wasn't responsive to stakeholder asks.
“I heard of a lot of frustration there. This doesn’t work. We’ve told them it doesn’t work. And we keep getting, ‘It can’t be fixed.’ And then all of a sudden, it’s fixed a-ways down the road. So, Its been a frustrating process,” said Lane.
The stakeholders have also not been happy with how the county managed the new RMS effort.
“A lack of strong project management and communication from McLean County has further eroded trust, leaving stakeholders concerned about vendor follow-through and the County’s ability to lead a successful transition,” said the report.
“If the McLean County project manager does not feel an issue is critical, then it is not slated to be fixed before go-live, and agencies must come up with their own solutions,” said the report.
McLean County Board Chair Elizabeth Johnston said the county took the consultant report to heart last spring.
“Knowing how unhappy the city and the town were in that meeting, it became a priority for me very quickly for me to make sure that their voices are included as we consider the future of that record management system,” said Johnson.
The consultant found several stakeholders have given up on Caliber. Yet the parties decided to go ahead with Caliber in July.
“We didn’t really have an alternative, honestly,” said Normal City Manager Pam Reece.
Reece noted the consultant cited security vulnerabilities for the old EJS system, software that's no longer being supported, and low confidence the system can retain stable performance.
“We moved forward but we all acknowledged that would be temporary for about two years,” said Reece.
Some of the users of EJS will be running the old system for another year to year and a half anyway since they never planned to use Caliber. Since that's the case, some stakeholders wondered why everyone couldn't keep using it for the next period, avoid any performance issue, and two years of expense for the new Caliber system.
Normal Police Chief Steve Petrilli said even now, EJS remains superior to what Caliber is offering and Caliber “feels like a step backward.”
Still, Bloomington City Manager Jeff Jurgens said he would not define the decision to keep Caliber for a couple years as throwing good money after bad.
“The case that was made was that all of the work had been done and so to be able to get that data transferred and everything up and running in Caliber was going to be a benefit when it eventually gets transferred into another record management system,” said Jurgens.
There are other logistical reasons the county went live with Caliber earlier this year too. Timelines for a new request for proposal [RFP] to replace Caliber aren't certain. There are contracts with various vendors that have different end and renewal dates. Plus, the sunk costs in Caliber totaling approximately $7 million over 10 years without staffing will partly be paid for by federal pandemic relief [ARPA] money. Changing horses now could cloud the already-approved use of the federal money, which has to be spent by a certain deadline.
Axon
Meanwhile, Bloomington and Normal are deciding to buy their own record management software from a firm called Axon.
Pam Reece from Normal said she hopes when the county goes out for another proposal for a record management system it will consider the choices the city and town have made when it issues a new RFP.
"I think the county will, absolutely. We’ve been having good conversations with the county. The county is open to considering the record management system called Axon that Bloomington just adopted. Normal is planning to move forward with that particular technology,” said Reece.
Bloomington City Manager Jeff Jurgens said he, too, thinks there will eventually be consensus on Axon.
“It’s going to take a while to get there. We’re still in the early stages but everybody’s at the table talking about this, and I’m confident that we’re all going to figure it out,” said Jurgens.
Who pays?
City and town RMS purchases raise a new issue. Why would the municipalities want to keep paying for the purchase of some new system for the county using shared sales tax money?
“That’s a very complex question,” said Reece.
Should the city and town get a price break on a replacement for Caliber?
“Well, we’re going to talk to the county about that and if the county chooses to switch from Caliber to Axon, I’m sure there’ll be lots of conversations about how does this all get funded and — yet to be determined,” said Reece.
Jurgens said the city agreement with Axon does allow them out, if they decide they don’t want to continue using their RMS. There may be flexibility as to which entity has what could be termed an umbrella contract with funding for all flowing through that.
“I think there are a number of different scenarios. I think part of it is also, if there is a master agreement, I think the city wants to be in control of its data, so how does that work? And there have been discussions with that,” said Jurgens.
In fact, "who pays for what" is part of the city and town's notice of default on the current shared sales tax agreement. One of the contested issues is whether shared sales tax can be used for a new record system apart from the sheriff’s department — say, for the State’s Attorney, Court Services, Coroner, and so on.
The language of the intergovernmental agreement includes this in section 3-2-C: “Community behavioral health initiatives, services and programs consistent with the McLean County Behavioral Health Action Plan, including provisions for an electronic integrated case-management system to be used by Town and City public-safety agencies.”
It’s not just the costs of standing up a new system that could be at issue. It’s paying ongoing costs once that’s done. The custom to cover the old EJS costs has been to bill Bloomington, Normal, the county, and other users in proportion to the number of records they put into the system.
Reece from Normal noted the lack of a formal arrangement on future costs also came up in that consultant's report last spring.
"That’s currently an unknown even with the Caliber system. I think it’s unknown — at least with the Town of Normal and perhaps the City of Bloomington — what our future obligation might be or if it’s always going to be covered by shared sales tax. We don’t know right now. So, we have the same questions either way," said Reece.
“We do want to sit down and have a very kind of clear hammered-out IGA [intergovernmental agreement] about how do we move forward with more specifics because that has become very clear that people want more specifics. So, let’s bring it into the conversation. Let’s get it documented and let’s make the plan and let’s work it,” said County Board Chair Elizabeth Johnston.
Johnston said the agency coordination EJS created is a huge building block for the identity of the community as a whole and one that has made the area a “safer community.” She said it has sparked other arrangements built on that initial collaboration.
“The state’s attorney has been much more open and engaging and working with the police departments to be responsive to their needs so they can react faster. The sheriff is very open about sharing his space so that if they want to interview one of their suspects, they can do it right there in the county facilities,” said Johnston.
And way down the list of uncertainties is whether small rural police departments will have to pay to use whatever record management system everyone finally settles on. They haven't had to pay so far, since they don't put in many records at all and there's agreement there is value for small police departments to have access to records when someone of interest comes into their towns.
But the city and town dispute with the county over whether non sheriff stakeholders should get to use shared sales tax money for their record management software could complicate the issue for tiny police departments too. Johnston acknowledged that will need to be discussed.
WGLT was unable to schedule an interview with Bloomington Police Chief Jamal Simington despite repeated attempts.
Timeline
- 2016 - Shared sales tax agreement ratified. One of the purposes is an EJS replacement.
- 2020 - Decision to transition to modern cloud-based browser interface record management system.
- 2022 - County chose existing vendor Caliber for replacement to EJS. One of the reasons the county chose Caliber was its experience with the county’s needs and wants for record management.
- 2023 - Initial go-live date of new Caliber product.
- Multiple delays – “Due to a lack of readiness of both the product solution and the project management team,” said consultant Mission Critical Partners [MCP]. A contributing factor was a second large project replacing the county’s Computer Aided Dispatch [CAD] system which interacts with the RMS.
- 2025 [Spring] - Bloomington and Normal express reluctance to proceed with the transition and indicate a desire to pursue their own RMS solutions. McLean County re-evaluates in light of that and hires MCP to help get stakeholder consensus.
- 2025 [Late July] - County moves ahead with Caliber go-live, as a temporary measure while a new request for proposal moves ahead.
- 2025 [September and October] - Bloomington moves ahead with and Normal plans to purchase their own record management systems as part of bundled agreements for pre-existing needs for new body worn camera, video storage, tasers, and other software. The city and town noted there are economies of scale for the bundled purchases.
