Title
Approving an interlocal agreement with Lower Colorado River Authority for a trunked radio system for the City's Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system, and authorizing the City Manager to execute the same.
Summary
As part of the FY2026 budget, the City's Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) staff formulated action plans to migrate the City's SCADA network away from the City's Enterprise IT network. This migration allows for greater security for the water and wastewater systems to take them "off-network" and not have them co-mingled with anything that is connected to the internet. With this migration, staff reviewed different options to migrate our remote facilities (pump stations, elevated tanks, lift stations) to a private, licensed radio network that is standalone and not connected to the internet at all, but can connect back to our major treatment facilities. City staff also evaluated the option of keeping the remote sites on a private Verizon network; however, this option would still require some connection to the internet which poses security vulnerabilities for critical infrastructure. Finally, staff have been working with the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) on evaluating the option to utilize their private LTE network that is only utilized for critical infrastructure and LCRA owns the entire LTE band they are operating within.
After evaluating these options, City staff determined that working with LCRA on utilizing this network was both the most cost effective solution and the most secure option to meet the City's SCADA network needs. It allows for a fully private network that isn't connected to the internet while also minimizing the City's need to construct additional infrastructure to obtain an FCC license to run a separate network. As LCRA's mission and infrastructure aligns with the City's in regards to the criticality of the operations, their network needs to keep this network running and operational would m...
Click here for full text