But seriously, this is a great move, and hopefully the start of helping other cities and municipalities provide more services to their citizens!
There was a startup discussed on here recently that was a SaaS platform for city management, I wonder if they have APIs that could be integrated into something like this.
The plugin system was well-curated and the config pages were powerful and clear.
Drupal may be awful under the hood, but I was very impressed with how much I could do without peeking under there or even googling "how do I X?".
I'd love to see somebody take a modern tech stack like .Net Core and Postgres or something like that and build a cleaner version of same.
As a Drupal frontender, I still get suprised when I discover another common site I use is actually on Drupal.
That checks a lot of boxes for enterprises in general, and governments in particular.
Plus it is a very powerful framework but is way cheaper than "traditional" license-based enterprise solutions like Oracle CMS. And it's open source, which is citizen-friendly and gives governments better long-term ownership of their technology.
Finally, although Drupal developers are their own sort of special flower (hopefully changing with Drupal 8), there are a lot of them and a lot of companies that provide Drupal development. So if you have to fire a vendor, you'll be able to find another one to step in without too much fuss.
It has become the defacto standard. Unfortunately, because it's a big mess indeed.
I know at least one that isn't: https://gov.uk/
They also open-source all their stuff: https://github.com/alphagov