From the Daily News:The company fired by the feds for the botched rollout of the Obamacare website has been “fired” again — the time by the New York City controller.
Controller Scott Stringer’s office refused Tuesday to approve a contract awarded by the Bloomberg administration to the Montreal-based firm CGI to overhaul the city’s 311 information hotline.
The Daily News reported that the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, known as DoITT, approved the contract hours before Mayor de Blasio took office, and that rival companies questioned CGI’s qualifications to do the work.
Sources said the controller’s office had questions about the planning and scope of the project and was concerned that the cost could balloon to as much as ten times the original $10 million pricetag.
An additional concern, sources said, was that the outgoing administration pushed through the contract on its final hours, denying de Blasio a say in the 311 overhaul.
In a letter Tuesday, Deputy Controller Lisa Flores said that if the new administration decides to go through with the project, it should request additional companies to bid on the work.
6 comments:
hurrah for stringer and transparency.
it's a shame that he had to waste time to kill this obviously spiteful contract by the funsize mayor,when he could have been working on other things.Lets hope a sheet of ice falls on tiny mike's head as a result of his secret dealings with developers and realtors.
Oh, leave the capetbagging megalomaniac shapeshifting reptilian closeted beard employing homo midget billionaire dilettante thief alone already!
Why can't the city hire NYers on a consulting basis to do the work?
There are so many older tech professionals that could spec out the system, manage the development, and then supervise the testing, roll-out, and maintenance.
The city could contract less-experienced freelancers to do the well-defined, closely-monitored programming and testing tasks.
Why do we need to outsource to Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, when NYC has so many highly-skilled professionals looking for work?
Why doesn't our government care about the people that they've been hired to take care of? Yes - elected means we hired them - they work for us.
Credit where credit is due to Stringer on this one. Now how about going after the big fish and investigating the 911 system?
Anon #3,
The answer to your first question is because most tech projects' price tags are well over the limit where bidding must be competitive. Whether or not NYers are working for the company with the winning proposal is secondary.
The real question is why Bloomberg insisted on shedding city technology workers when the lifetime salary + benefits + pension for many of these employees would likely be less than the exorbitant price tags of even a single of the larger IT projects. We'd get a career's worth of work out of them, and they'd be paying taxes directly to the city and state. The answer to that question, I'm sure, you can conjecture.
I don't get the concern. Obamacare is the greatest thing to happen to the United States since the lightbulb.
Sure, the website hit a couple snags, but so what? And yes, we might lose the equivalent of 2.3 million full-time jobs, but those are people who choose not to work, and the rest of us can easily take care of them, there's so much wealth to go around.
I hope the next time the president visits the city for someone's fundraiser he gets a chance to straighten out Stringer and get him back on the team.
And Canada's just a better country than us, face it.
Go Affordable Care Act! Go Obama! Go Canada! Go Hillary 2016!
Post a Comment