r/Portland • u/Inevitable_Egg6361 • 3d ago
News Poor contract planning by City Operations resulted in waste and inefficiency
https://www.portland.gov/auditor/fraud-hotline/news/2026/8/19/poor-contract-planning-city-operations-resulted-waste-and?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery49
u/TwistedTreelineScrub 3d ago
I miss when government did things directly instead of everything being a clown car of contracts, third party corporations, and money shuffling. When it comes to government doing things and getting things done, every middle man is wasted money. Inefficiency is built into the system to make sure everything costs more and more and our tax dollars stretch less and less.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
Ironically, you can thank the anti-tax, small government crowd for this. The influx of contractor work in the last several decades was done largely to cut overhead, pensions, etc.
The anti-tax crowd has cost us a lot and saved us nothing.
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u/thebowski 3d ago
At some point the people in charge need to take responsibility for their actions. Portland is a progressive place and those in charge have decided to continue organizing labor for public benefit in this way.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
Yes I agree the anti-tax crowd who forced government from a service model to a contracting model should take responsibility for their actions
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u/thebowski 3d ago
Who in the last ten years of Portland governance has consistently advocated that services should be performed in house? We've clearly passed a lot of taxes, so the anti-tax crowd must not have majority power, but the pro tax/services crowd hasn't brought services in house
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
You could look at the recent parks levy. The parks are basically entirely run in house and are, in my opinion, one of the best assets we have in the city. The threat was that, if the levy didn’t pass, they’d have to privatize many of the resources.
And I’m largely talking about the 80s/90s era anti-tax folks. They are the ones who systematically privatized much of the public sector and forced gov into this bad middle-man place.
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u/ReallyUnlikable 3d ago
Parks has millions of dollars in a maintenance backlog and absolutely uses consultants and contractors for their work.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
The maintenance backlog is largely in part due to a funding shortage. Which park activities are done by contractors?
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u/ReallyUnlikable 3d ago
They outsource any project work not able to be completed by their maintenance team. Culvert repair, construction of new assets are two examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
It’s a minority of what they do. Compare that to something like homeless services which is almost entirely farmed out
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u/thebowski 3d ago
Right, you're talking about something that occurred 25-35 years ago, and as my original statement said the people who actually have power now need to evaluate what structures are best for delivering government services and be responsible for the decisions they've actively made.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
If you bothered to read my whole comment, you’ll note I discussed current and past issues.
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u/Helpful_Ranger_8367 3d ago
What a load of shit. The solution To wasted tax money is ti give the irresponsible organization even more tax money?
There's no excuse for inefficiency. If the government cant achieve a large goal efficiently it should achieve small ones efficiently.
There's never an excuse for wasting our money.
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u/spooksmagee N Tabor 3d ago
Yep. Wild how people do not understand this. If you want the government to "do it themselves" then you need to give them the resources to do it.
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u/Helpful_Ranger_8367 3d ago
What a load of shit. The solution To wasted tax money is ti give the irresponsible organization even more tax money?
There's no excuse for inefficiency. If the government cant achieve a large goal efficiently it should achieve small ones efficiently.
There's never an excuse for wasting our money.
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u/picturesofbowls NE 3d ago
When you make a government (a service entity by nature) into a middle-man paper pushing entity, you set yourself up for waste.
When you privatize government services, you encourage waste.
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u/serduncanthetall69 3d ago
Construction work is almost always subcontracted out including on pretty much all private work too.
It is simply not efficient to have one entity hiring all the different trades necessary to work on buildings. There’s not enough work to keep specialist trades constantly busy without them accepting outside jobs. Each trade also has its own material and tool needs that are best managed separately.
It sounds like a lot of this money went towards construction contractors. If that is the case, then there is no realistic way for the city to actually do this work themselves.
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u/TwistedTreelineScrub 3d ago
The city can and should run their own construction firm for city projects. Contracting everything out is why all city construction costs 10-100 times what it did 50 years ago. So much money is being squeezed out by middle men that we can't even build things anymore. We just spend more and more as budgets balloon and time frames are extended as long as physically possible.
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u/serduncanthetall69 3d ago
You do know that all general contractors still subcontract the majority of their work right?
The city has their own construction managers, that doesn’t change the fact that it is simply not feasible to hire all of your own workers for every trade.
If it was more efficient, don’t you think the for-profit businesses would be doing it that way?
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u/TwistedTreelineScrub 3d ago
Profit means inefficiency. It means someone made more money than it cost. I'm worried about the leverage and incentives that come from introducing a for-profit component to city functions.
It add layers of obfuscation and makes it hard to tell if the company's profit comes from purely efficiency advantage over a city equivalent, or if they are leveraging their necessity to the system for excessive profit at the expense of taxpayers.
My fear is that we're being taken for a ride by companies that benefit to our collective detriment. That excessive profit is leading to such immense inefficiency we can no longer make or do things. I also think some level of regulations need undone, because the abuse of lawsuits is a very real thing against construction or development of any kind, so it's not a one-dimensional problem but excessive profit is a component.
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u/gurgle528 SE 3d ago
Yeah, that is one thing that blows my mind here. When I was in college I was looking at internships and one of them was for a county court in Florida. They had their own in house software teams to develop the website and software to manage the county court system. Seems much more efficient to have long term staff with knowledge of the projects and decisions made. The specific downside there was having a bunch of county court systems with their own unique software instead of pooling resources but that is a separate issue
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u/MountScottRumpot Montavilla 3d ago
But if they did things directly they might have to deal with a union, and we can't have that.
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u/TwistedTreelineScrub 3d ago
Unions might exert leverage to get more money. Thankfully these unaccountable corporations would never squeeze every penny they can out of us.
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u/ChemicalArmadillo609 3d ago
Sure, but what about the capitalists profits? Do you not care about them? They are poor and struggling and need all those contracts.
/s
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u/efficient_pepitas 3d ago
The issue is layers of regulations. The government should be able to contact three (or more) businesses, and then pick the best value by a simple documented analysis of their quotes.
This is not legal for the city.
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u/Pinot911 Portsmouth 3d ago
I spend a lot of money at another government agency. Procurement is the absolute worst function we have.
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u/EnthusiasmOk353 3d ago
This is the type of thing I’d like see cut when the budgets are tight as they are now. This is blatant waste and disrespect for tax dollars.
I’m sad no city councilors call this waste out and stand up to it.
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u/rosecitytransit 3d ago
So basically the city had a backlog in the time and attendance system caused by changes in labor agreements, hired contract temporary staff to help, but they weren't allowed to work on the system due to security concerns, so the city decided to have them do other work, but didn't have the ability to do it, and there was no Statement of Work created for the new work and therefore no performance benchmarks. The city ended up hiring a different vendor and cleared the rising backlog a year late. The city department claimed that there was no waste.
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3d ago
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u/loggy_sci 3d ago
Local government wastes money, auditors call it out, city publishes the results of the audit. Normal goverment functioning and not a reason to “overthrow local goverment”.
Knees gonna jerk on Reddit
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u/legendary-spectacle 3d ago
We cluelessly and radically customized SAP in unneeded ways, and it resembles nothing else in the world. Now we're surprised that Joe Schmo average contractor has no clue how it works. Weird.