Marine City signs with new online code hosting service

Clerk says it will promote more transparency for users

By Barb Pert Templeton

At a recent meeting of the Marine City Commission officials got a presentation from City Clerk Jason Bell regarding transitioning the city’s codification, supplements and online code hosting services from American Legal Publishing to CivicPlus also referred to as Municode.

The April 2 commission meeting had Ball explaining to officials the fact that the city’s Code of Ordinances requires regular online maintenance to keeps things accurate, transparent and legally defensible.

In his memo in the meeting packet Bell stated that under the city’s current structure, codification costs fluctuate based on page counts and related variable billing practices. This makes long-term budgeting difficult and creates uncertainty with each update cycle.

City Manager Michael Reaves said the administration actually didn’t need a vote of the commission to approve the change to the new vendor because it’s allowed under the city’s purchasing policy. Despite that fact, Reaves said he still thought Bell should explain the reasoning behind the change.

Bell began by explaining that the city has been talking about the issue for several months since the city created the ordinance review committee. He said the city has a very large number of ordinances that need amending and with the current vendor, American Legal Publishing, providing that service to the city they charge per page to codify ordinances. (Codify means to arrange laws or rules into a systematic code.)

“We figured in the long run it’s going to end up costing us a lot of money when we amend all those ordinances,” Bell said.

He also had to realize that in many cases the language had to be changed for things like gender neutral issues and including state laws and lots had to be brought up to date.

Keeping that in mind, Bell went out and got some quotes for the work and even considered an entire recodification of the all of the ordinances but that would take a year and cost triple what they are currently paying,

“So, we opted with a re-publication with Municode to do online code hosting and a legal review as well,” Bell said. “I think the legal review is important and speaking with Attorney (Robert) Davis I think it gives us a little bit more leverage in our ordinances and making sure everything is correct.”

Overall costs for service will be lower

The pricing for the contract with Municode came out to $8,750 for the first year, with the breakdown being a one-time fee of $1,000 for republications, $4,000 in legal fees and then it includes the annual contract going forward which will be $3,750.

The Municode contract will include 25 GB (gigabytes) of storage per year and Bell said he thinks that will promote more transparency as the city can upload resolutions, policies and contracts as they come up so they can be out there for the public.

“Everything’s all in one spot and then the state statute linking kind of takes the brunt of the work off the administration and city attorney to go through because if there’s any state or federal law changes, they will change those and update them,” Bell said.

The city has been with American Legal Publishing for 20 years and their pricing structure “per page is going to be astronomical” with all the reviews coming up for city ordinances, Bell said. But with Municode, the city will just pay a flat fee.

“I think this is beneficial for us to make the change,” Bell said. “With Municode if we have 20 amendments that are 120 pages each you still just pay that flat fee.”

Commissioner Sean O’Brien asked Bell what the city pays American Legal Publishing annually and he said about $4,200.

“This is a little more up front but it’s going to end up saving us money,” Bell said.

Davis said Municode is the most utilized service for municipalities and searching is simple and the service is very popular among users.

Reaves said he was also in favor of the change to the Municode services.