During Monday night's Swift Current city council meeting, some light was shed on an unseen cost affecting taxpayers.

A software the City uses to keep track of various facets of government, Oracle Fusion Cloud, has quietly become quite an expense over the years.  

This software has run up a bill of $267,793 for 2023, 2024, and 2025, and then $236,659 for 2026 and 2027, or just over $1.250 million all together. This unseen and silent expense is something Swift Current Mayor Al Bridal thought was worth highlighting after city council voted to renew the subscription.

"We go paperless in this world and we're going to save so much energy and so much money and every year we spend this much money just on one system in our city," commented Bridal. 

Bridal went on to iterate how years ago when he was a member of city council, they spent around $500,000 on similar software for 10 to 12 years. These days, that cost has ballooned to a far great total, which the city has to eat the cost of as part of the price of doing business. 

"It's over $20,000 a month just so we can run our programs here at the City," noted Bridal. "When people talk about taxes, they mention potholes. Potholes do cost us money, but this subscription costs us an awful lot of money, too."

While the cost is necessary, it doesn't make it any smaller. These kinds of fees that go into running and maintaining a City would appear to be growing, and will undoubtedly be a factor in taxes going into the future from now on. 

"I just want the citizens to realize that to have all this information so handy and available costs money and it costs a great deal of money," remarked Bridal.  "It's the modern world, we can't not have it, but it's just a huge expense that most people don't see."