In a meeting Jan. 27, Treasurer Ron Brooks told the Hyattsville City Council that a five-year effort to update the city’s record-keeping software must be abandoned and begun again.
The failed effort will cost the city $524,000 in payments to a contractor called BC Systems, Brooks said in an interview.
The city spent much more than that on staff time and contract IT services, according to council documents and conversations with former and current staff.
It could be worse. The grocery store chain Lidl once spent €500 million on a similar system it had to abandon in 2018.
Going live when you aren’t ready has consequences too: flawed software rollouts around the country have led to multiple lawsuits against counties from people wrongfully jailed.
Treasurer Brooks said he recalls spending two years fixing errors from a premature rollout during his time as finance director for Cleveland, Ohio in the early 2000s.
What went wrong in Hyattsville, and why did it take 13 years?
Councilmember Joseph Solomon (Ward 5) says he works on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for governments in his day job. He was surprised to learn, after he was elected in 2013, that the city had no ERP system. He began advocating for one, making a 2013 budget request.
Brooks believes the city selected the wrong contractor. He wanted to use Tyler Technologies, which provides the software that his department uses.
“I thought the Tyler proposal was the best,” Brooks said, “because it was local government focused.”
In memos to the mayor and council in 2016 and again in 2020, staff included Tyler Technologies as one of two top possibilities, and recommended the alternate vendor, with council approval.
Jim Chandler, the city’s economic development director at the time, said the sourcing and procurement alone was exhaustive, taking years, in part because city management had difficulty settling on what was needed. In the end, BC Systems scored the best on predetermined criteria, and was more flexible and customizable than Tyler Technologies, according to Chandler and memos to council.
Chandler said he was surprised that the system was never implemented. At the time he left Hyattsville in 2022, the city had seemed poised to roll-out the first phase of implementation several times, and had a new schedule in place for completion.
Solomon explained that more responsibility for ERP implementation moved to the treasurer’s office when Chandler left.
“This city has a history of asking the treasurer to do too much,” Solomon said. Brooks said that in multiple rounds of testing, the system was not producing results accurate enough to allow the city to go live on the software.
Solomon also posited that, based on his experience in the industry, it is possible that more of the testing and set-up should have fallen to the vendor, rather than to Brooks, an end-user.
“I don’t think it was ever one person’s top priority,” said Councilmember Emily Strab (Ward 2), who explained that she did not realize that ERP rollout might need council oversight until she began serving as liaison to the city’s audit committee last year.
Brooks insists that despite his reservations, he was committed to the implementation and did his best to make it work. “I desperately tried to get a win here.” He said the implementation needed buy-in and staff time from each department, which was difficult to achieve. “Nobody likes change.”
Why do we need an ERP system anyway?
ERP systems widen data access across departments, so that everyone gets information faster, and staff don’t have to enter the same data in multiple systems.
“ERP solutions run just about everything that we touch in our daily lives,” said Councilmember Solomon. NBA and NFL statistics, almost instantly updated, are products of ERP systems, Solomon said.
City Communications Director Cindy Zork said ERP might, for example, speed coordination on residents’ snow-related requests between communications, public works and the police.
A well-designed ERP system, in Treasurer Brooks’ view, would help maximize city services, in the way ERPs for businesses help maximize profit.
City council member Strab said she has learned as a liaison to the city’s audit committee that having a working ERP is a non-negotiable upgrade for Hyattsville, necessary for efficiency as the city’s budget has grown.
So, what now?
With retirements on the horizon for Hyattsville’s longtime senior accountant, Mary Ellen Harding, and Public Works Director Leslie Riddle, Solomon thinks it may be wise to wait on a new rollout effort until there is more stability in key leadership positions. Audit committee recommendations in the fall anticipated a possible failure in the BC Systems implementation, and targeted a 2027 rollout.
Strab and Brooks say increased staffing in Hyattsville’s chronically understaffed finance department should help with a future ERP rollout, among other priorities. With the addition of Hyattsville’s brand new budget director, Ben Brosch, the department will have six full-time employees going forward. The city is also looking to hire an in-house IT director.
Brooks said that in 2013, the finance department had three employees including him, and a part-time filing clerk.
Asked whether having an ERP platform in place would help the city catch up on chronically overdue audits, Brooks said “no, not really,” and called the comparison of delays in audits to delays in ERP implementation an “apples to oranges and pears” comparison.
It is difficult to complete more than one audit a year, according to Brooks, given the workload of Hyattsville’s finance staff and the small auditing firms that will take on municipal audits. Hyattsville has managed it twice over the past decade, once with the assistance of a larger firm that no longer takes municipal clients, only to slide behind again during the pandemic or with a change in firms.
Brooks is struggling to get the 2024 audit completed this month (March 2026), which would be a year after he delivered the 2023 audit. He says though that the auditing firm has already started working on 2025, due last fall.
“In my career in government finance, I’ve been the fix-it man everywhere I’ve been. I’ve been in big and small places,” said Brooks, who arrived in Hyattsville from Ohio in the wake of Hyattsville uproar involving delayed audits and the sudden resignation of Hyattsville’s city administrator and treasurer.
“It’s difficult,” Brooks said. “I’ve been beat up by the best over the years. Most people don’t have that longevity like I have. And I’m proud, because it’s hard to stay in these jobs in this position when you have everybody beating you up and thinking they know better than you.”
Still, Brooks is optimistic that new staffing levels in his department will help it keep up with the city’s growth, whether or not he stays on as treasurer.
The Hyattsville Life & Times has submitted a Maryland Public Information Act request to the City of Hyattsville for amounts paid to all contractors over the last ten years for ERP implementation.
The dates and times for Hyattsville’s 2026 scheduled budget hearings are available at Hyattsville.org/budget.
This article was corrected Mar. 6. A prior version said that Ron Brooks came to Hyattsville from Cleveland. Brooks worked as finance director for East Cleveland before coming to Hyattsville, though he has also worked as finance director for Cleveland during an earlier period. It was also corrected to change a dollar sign to a euro sign for the cost of the failed Lidl ERP rollout.