By Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt
More than $200 million goes for services city workers could provide much, much cheaper.
San Francisco has 3,747 vacant jobs—and has spent more than $211 million in the past two years filling some of those positions with outside contractors who charge far more than what city workers would earn, a new study shows.
And the vast majority of that money goes to big out-of-town companies—that is, it leaves San Francisco and does nothing to help the local economy…
The study, by analysts with IFPTE Local 21, which represents thousands of city employees, shows that the percentage of the city budget spend on local workers has dropped from 51 percent ten years ago to 46 percent today.
In some departments, like the scandal-plagued Public Works, the drop has been even more dramatic: DPW used to spend 35 percent of its budget on staff, and now it’s 26 percent.
In the meantime, DPW and the Public Utilities Commission have contracts worth more than $150 million on contracts with companies like AECOM, a giant engineering outfit based in Dallas, which paid its CEO $9.5 million last year.
AECOM charges the city far more than it would cost to fill that job with public employees:…(more)
It is not often you can connect two different stories under such a juicy title as this:
“Overpaid city contractors caught in corrupt schemes. Labor cries foul, threatens to strike.”