Jobs website might bring $100K bill

A split City Council on Tuesday night approved spending another $39,000 for Sioux Falls' new jobs website, and $25,000 more is expected before the year's end.

During a briefing of the Sioux Falls City Council, Community Development Director Darrin Smith said the launch of SiouxFallsHasJobs.com earlier this month and the advertising campaign used to promote it have cost the city about $36,000 so far – building the website that pulls job listings from a leading aggregating site cost $24,000, and another $11,500 was spent on promotional tools like billboards and kiosks.

That tally took a big jump toward reaching the $100,000 threshold Smith estimated would be required to fully fund SiouxFallsHasJobs.com and the tools used to drive people to it when the council voted 4-3 to authorize a $39,000 consulting contract with Sioux Falls-based Electric Pulp for website maintenance through the end of 2015.

"(The contract) establishes rates for maintenance, enhancements, technical support," Smith said. "Assuming there are no surprises or bumps along the way … I would expect us to land somewhere between that $30,000 to $35,000."

But that's not the last of the bills associated with SiouxFallsHasJobs.com likely to run through City Hall before 2016's arrival. Smith said more advertising is expected to go up throughout the region – Omaha, the Twin Cities and Des Moines could be future destinations – and could result in another $25,000 in promotional costs. Those additional expenses would push the year-end total for the website recruitment effort at "right around $100,000," he said.

For Councilor Greg Jamison, that's too much money to be spending on a project that city councilors weren't a part of planning. Jamison, joined by Councilors Kermit Staggers and Christine Erickson in voting no, also questioned why Electric Pulp wasn't contracted to provide maintenance at the time it was hired to build the website.

"Only three months ago we entered into a contract with the same company to build the website. Is that how we would normally do it?" he asked. "Would we ever buy a generator and have it maybe delivered but not hooked up?"

Jamison said the perception is the Community Development Department piecemealed the project in order to fund it without council approval – contracts of $25,000 or more require an endorsement from the council.

"You've already started this ball rolling and now if we vote against this (contract) we're wasting … $50 grand," he said. "That's a lousy place for us to be put. It's a lousy way to lead this project. It's a lousy way to develop an initiative like this."

Many projects require incremental steps, Smith said, and launching SiouxFallsHasJobs.com required analysis every step of the way.

"You create a website and you do that the best way you can. To me it would have been irresponsible to speculate three months ago to build in guaranteed amounts (for Electric Pulp)," he said. "We've done it this way to be very judicious and responsible."

Heather Hitterdal, spokesperson for the mayor's office, said keeping the website from going public before its launch wasn't about pulling one over on the council.

"It took a lot of time and effort starting probably back in December … to work through this process," she said. "I don't feel like it was secretive. That was never the intention of this project."

BY THE NUMBERS

$24,000 - Paid to Electric Pulp to build SiouxFallsHasJobs.com

$11,500 - Amount spent on advertising to date

$39,000 - Electric Pulp contract for web maintenance