Let's have three cheers for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Comptroller Joan Pratt for coming to an agreement on a plan to move forward with the modernization of the city government's telephone system — one for each year that has been wasted in their pointless, petulant feud. The two are congratulating themselves for the fact that, as the mayor's spokesman put it, "They did what people expect elected officials to do: They came together, sat down and ... worked it out." Too bad for the taxpayers that the city wasted some $6 million and maybe more in the three years it took them to act like grown-ups.
Baltimore's city government has a lot of phone lines — 14,000 of them — but they are an old copper wire-based system for which the city pays Verizon a small fortune, even though many of the lines lack features consumers now take for granted, like voice mail. The obvious solution, and one that is rapidly becoming the standard for residential and business customers, is Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP. Effectively, it's a technology that piggybacks on the Internet infrastructure in a home or business to make voice calls. Among the advantages for an entity like the city government is that it means running one system rather than two and, in the process, saving taxpayers' money.
How much money? Estimates have varied. Ms. Pratt, whose office has traditionally run the city's phone system, put the figure at one point at $400,000 a month. One of the mayor's former information technology chiefs pegged it at more than $2 million a year. Either way, that amounts to a lot of money in the three years since Ms. Rawlings-Blake blocked a $7.4 million upgrade contract with IBM on the grounds that it was too expensive.
To their credit, city officials recognized the wisdom of switching to VOIP years ago; the effort to make the upgrade has been in the works since at least 2010. But any credit due to any of the parties involved ran out quickly.
Ms. Rawlings-Blake's first information technology chief, who later was forced to resign over reports of ethical violations in a former job in New York, apparently decided that Ms. Pratt's office couldn't handle the upgrade to his liking and started surreptitiously installing VOIP equipment in City Hall. When Ms. Pratt found out, she made a stink — and rightly so. The mayor dug in her heels and blocked the IBM contract. Ms. Pratt sued with free legal help from the Law Offices of Peter Angelos, a bit of pro bono work that later led to an investigation of whether the comptroller had violated city ethics laws. (Her suit was dismissed with prejudice.) Meanwhile, we've had an audit into the wastefulness of the current phone system, and an Inspector General's report showing that not only had the mayor's information technology chief likely wasted money with his secret upgrade but that the administration actively concealed its existence from other city officials.
There is a legitimate question about whether the comptroller's office or the Mayor's Office of Information Technology is better suited to run a VOIP system. It's also legitimate to ask whether the bidding process Ms. Pratt conducted in 2011 was sufficiently robust. Three companies submitted bids, but one was disqualified because it was late, and another was deemed deficient on technical grounds, leaving only IBM.
But it's impossible to escape the conclusion that all this could have been worked out long ago if not for the personality clash between the comptroller and the mayor. The saga has been filled with histrionics, disrespect and jealousies, with neither side, apparently until recently, willing to be the first to bury the hatchet.
After today's Board of Estimates meeting, the pair managed to stand at a podium together in a stiff show of solidarity, though they declined to answer any substantive questions about how the process will move forward. And to be clear, that's a big question. They haven't agreed on a plan to upgrade the phones but rather on a plan to develop a plan. The only real action so far is a $205,000 contract for a Silver Spring firm to run a new competitive bidding process for a system upgrade. Which means that we're effectively back to where the city was in about 2010. Bravo, indeed.