The Farmington Town Council voted unanimously at a special meeting Tuesday night to hire CivicPlus to rebuild the town's website, at a first-term price of $61,690.98. That is about $13,300 under the $75,000 the council had already set aside for the project in this year's capital improvement program.
Beginning in year two of the agreement, the annual operating cost is $48,902.68. Farmington currently budgets roughly $12,000 a year for website hosting and content management.
That is an increase of about $36,900 a year, recurring, and the agreement is built to grow from there: a 5 percent annual uplift beginning in year two, and automatic one-year renewals unless the town gives 60 days' notice.
Walking away later is not simply a matter of cancelling, either. The town's own information technology manager told the council that if Farmington ever drops CivicPlus, it keeps its data and its content but loses the back end that runs the site.
What the town is buying
The recommendation came from the Ad Hoc Technology Committee, created in April and presented to the council by Assistant Town Manager Kat Krajewski, Information Technology Manager Brian Rush, and Town Council members Bruce Polsky and Keith Vibert. The committee met ten times, reviewed multiple vendors, and came back unanimous.
What it recommended is not really a website. The contract carries two line items: $43,420.60 for what CivicPlus calls Web Central, the site and the content management system behind it, and $18,270.38 for SeeClickFix, a 311 service-request platform. Bundled in are an AI chatbot restricted to town content, a resident portal, automated accessibility tools, built-in translation, and a notification system that lets residents subscribe to the specific things they care about rather than everything the town posts.
The 311 platform is the piece built for residents to use directly. A pothole gets reported from a phone, with a photo attached, and the resident can follow the request until it closes. Duplicate reports collapse into one. Staff answer in the same place.
The committee told the council it had deliberately rejected assembling the best individual product in each category. "That's like building a car from parts," the presentation put it, and an expensive way to go besides. Committing to a single vendor is also what produced the discount: the quote sheet reflects a total discount of $18,768, and Krajewski credited the committee with negotiating it.
The year-two number
Krajewski stated the increase plainly. "While this represents a significant increase over our current website hosting costs," she told the council, "it's important to recognize that we're no longer paying solely for website hosting."
The list of what the town is now paying for is genuinely longer: hosting, the content management system, the resident portal, the chatbot, 311, accessibility compliance, translation, and notifications. It is also roughly four times the current line, every year. This is the same council that passed a $143 million budget in April and seated a building committee for a $30 million fire station overhaul earlier this month.
The escalator drew one question at the table. Asked whether the annual increase was fixed, CivicPlus told the council the 5 percent uplift is negotiable. The company also said anything added to the package later carries its own cost.
Corporation Counsel reviews the agreement before the town manager signs it.
Who owns it when it is built
If Farmington ever leaves CivicPlus, it keeps its data and its content and loses the thing that runs the site. Arriving at that answer took several rounds of questioning Tuesday, and none of it was about price.
"Who owns the website?" Town Council member Bill Beckert asked, joining by Zoom. "Does the town of Farmington own the website, the revised website?" He returned to it, asking whether the intellectual property created during the build belongs to Farmington or is being licensed from CivicPlus.
Council member Patti Boye-Williams turned it into the version that got a complete answer: if Farmington leaves CivicPlus in five or six years and picks a different company, does the town keep what it built?
The answer came in pieces. Michael Nicholson, an enterprise account executive for CivicPlus, was unambiguous about the data. "We would never withhold your data. We would never sell your data," he said. "The data you own in perpetuity, you could download that." Content stays the town's as well, including the record of questions residents put to the chatbot.
Then Rush supplied the limit. "If we left CivicPlus, we'd lose the back end of the website," he said. The town would still hold its data and its content, he explained, but would have to find another provider to supply that back end before it could edit any of it.
The chatbot and SeeClickFix are licensed, not owned. Farmington keeps its words and its numbers. It does not keep the machine that publishes them.
FarmingtonCT.gov, and the email that is not moving
The town is getting a .gov address. The new site will live at farmingtonct.gov, and the existing farmington-ct.org address will redirect to it automatically at launch.
Town email is a harder problem, and it is not moving yet. Rush explained that shifting staff addresses to .gov would mean moving Farmington's entire Microsoft 365 account out of the ordinary commercial version and into the separate one Microsoft runs for government customers, a project with its own cost and its own timeline. Residents will be pointed to web contact forms instead of direct addresses in the meantime.
None of this touches emergency alerts. Everbridge stays in place for public-safety notifications; the tools in the CivicPlus package handle agendas, meetings and town news.
What happens next
Implementation is expected to take 16 to 28 weeks, and the clock starts at a signature that has not happened yet. CivicPlus handles content migration, and the company told the council the build requires about ten hours of town staff time. The 311 platform goes live alongside the site, before the public launch.
Farmington is not a new CivicPlus customer. The town has used the company's social media archiving product for roughly three years, acquired along the way when CivicPlus bought the firm that originally sold it. SeeClickFix was a New Haven company before CivicPlus acquired that as well.
The motion was made by Boye-Williams and seconded by Dave Wlodkowski. It passed without a dissenting vote, as did every other item on Tuesday's agenda, including a $129,190 contract with Weston & Sampson to rewrite the town's plan of conservation and development and run a town-wide community survey. Eight firms had wanted that job in May.
The site the town is buying will be visible to everyone. The line item that keeps it running will not be, until the next budget cycle.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A town can rent the platform its records live on. It cannot rent the records. Farmington Storage understands the distinction, at institutional grade. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington government long enough to know that the interesting number in a municipal contract is rarely the one in the headline. He is on his second coffee and has read the quote sheet. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the special meeting that ran to 9:33 p.m., the line item buried in a vendor packet, the vote that decides what your town's website costs in 2028. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we stand behind it. By the time you read this, the dust has settled and the arithmetic has been checked. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰