San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie will commit to releasing weekly reports on how the tech firm OpenGov is overhauling the city’s embattled permitting systems — a contract it won even though city staff said it was not the best suited for the task.
PermitSF, Lurie’s initiative to tackle city permitting, was a key promise on the campaign trail. It launched earlier this year, with the goal of streamlining and centralizing permitting so that all city permits can be obtained through a single web portal.
The decision to release the weekly progress reports comes a month after media reports revealed that the mayor’s office went outside normal procedure to award the $5.9 million contract to build the new permitting system to OpenGov. The company’s costs were far higher than competitors, and it scored poorly with a panel of city staffers.
The company’s leadership also has ties to Lurie including past donations to his campaign and his former nonprofit. The deal prompted Supervisor Jackie Fielder to call for a hearing to investigate the process.
Ned Segal, the mayor’s policy chief for housing and economic development, “unilaterally” overruled a staff recommendation in awarding the contract to OpenGov, according to the San Francisco Standard.
The weekly updates will serve as “something public, so people can read it themselves without our explanation or yours, and it’s just out there in the open for people,” Segal said in an interview Tuesday. He hoped that the updates would bring some “transparency benefit” to the project, Segal added.
The documents, the mayor’s office said, will be shared whether they report good progress, bad progress or no progress.
The first three weekly status reports, written by OpenGov’s project manager, Angelica Au, were sent on Oct. 31, Nov. 7 and Nov. 14. The latest memo indicates that the goal of rolling out fire permits, building permits and events permits by February is realistic.
Earlier this year, many in the city felt that goal was aggressive at best, and unrealistic at worst.
Between late October and mid-November, the project health of PermitSF moved from a red status, indicating the presence of major issues, to a stable yellow status, indicating only potential risks to project delivery.
Meanwhile, over the three weeks, some due dates have been postponed by several days to several weeks, including one that has been pushed back by as long as four weeks.
The weekly updates also identified small potential barriers to meeting the February deadline including the day off for Veterans Day.
“What we’re looking for is to see that, each week, you are making progress, that you’re having new challenges come up,” said Segal in the interview, whether it’s about collaboration between departments, or how to tie two software systems together.
In an interview today, Florence Simon, director of the Mayor’s Office of Innovation, added that meeting the February deadline to roll out a subset of permits is “a big deal.”
“The last time somebody tried to do this, which was Accela before Ned and I got here, it was like an eight-year project that cost $12 million and no permits,” she said.
Lurie has steadfastly stood by the controversial contract in the past month, and Segal spoke highly of the collaboration with OpenGov.
“OpenGov have been great partners because they’ve done this implementation many times, they are able to look around corners and help us understand what challenge might come next,” he said.
The 13-year-old firm says that it has worked with more than 2,000 governments across the country. It is unclear, however, whether it has worked with any clients similar to the size and complexity of San Francisco.
The two references OpenGov listed in its response to the PermitSF Request For Information were Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The former has a population of about 121,000 and the latter has a population of around 191,000, though the city’s request for information required references from public sector clients that can speak to the vendor’s experience with cities “at a similar scale to San Francisco.”
Regarding the upcoming hearing called for by Supervisor Fielder, Segal said, “We’re just going to keep plugging away on the implementation.”
Will the reports be as thorough and deep-diving as his vetting of Bella?
We thought a Billionaire would be less corrupt than Breed.
Why did we think that?
So Lurie went out of established channels for selecting vendors, top-down forcing a more expensive and lower scoring bidder into the contract… and now says oh, we’ll make ‘reports’ to show how good or bad they do? Does anyone trust these ‘reports’ to be unbiased and accurate given he just railroaded the entire accountability process? “Oh, good progress this week!” Sure sure sure.
“The company’s leadership also has ties to Lurie including past donations to his campaign and his former nonprofit.”
And there’s the issue. Daniel-san you are doing things the Billionaire way.
This is why we elect public servants with a track record of… not this.
While I agree that the optics of overruling the staff recommendation are concerning, I am also willing to see if they can meet the first benchmark. The most important thing is that the software / system works. Cost is important, but the cheapest contract isn’t worth a damn if it doesn’t get the job done on time and deliver a quality product.
If we look at the disaster of the SFUSD payroll system, it was supposed to cost $9.5 million in 2019. As of this point, SFUSD spent $40 million on the 2019 project, and it completely failed and was scrapped in favor of a new vendor that is supposed to cost an additional $15-20 million. So call me a skeptic when it comes to SF staff knowing how to pick a vendor. At least now, Lurie’s reputation is on the line if this doesn’t work out.
The fact that we are getting the progress reports unfiltered is a huge win for the public, and will provide some level of transparency that government projects rarely provide. If the deliverables come in on time, the actual costs of the contract will be way less than if we went with a “cheaper” vendor.
The city’s track record in selecting software vendors is, to be blunt, completely appalling. (SFUSD’s payroll vendors, and Accela, say hi.)
This isn’t entirely the city’s fault; the median American government, at every level, is also completely appalling—whole books have been written about the problem. But basically if staff recommends a software vendors, you’re almost certainly better off picking the vendor they didn’t pick.
This is way worse than phony client dinners and rat shit in d4, thanks for staying with the story.
“The company’s costs were far higher than competitors, and it scored poorly with a panel of city staffers.”
Strike two, Billionaire.
Is this the same mayor who promised 1,500 new shelter beds – only to later say “never mind” ?
Sorry, I don’t believe anything he says. He should stick to increasing the number of drunk zones and leave the important decisions to the professionals.