Mayor de Blasio is about to end the era of huge technology firms feeding off taxpayers with their legions of $500,000-a-year consultants camped at scores of city agencies for years.
On May 15, de Blasio’s top aides completed months of secret talks with the city’s largest municipal union on a far-reaching new “IT Insourcing” agreement.
First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris has committed in that pact, a copy of which the Daily News obtained, to “use city employees for IT work where it will achieve financial savings and improve service delivery, by reducing reliance on external IT consultants.”
City officials expect to save $3.6 million this year through the insourcing plan, but that figure could potentially rise to nearly $100 million over five years, according to the pact’s supporting documents.
De Blasio has thus turned into general policy an effort he began last year, when he took much of the city’s botched upgrade of the 911 system away from private contractors like Northrop Grumman and turned it over to municipal workers.
This signals a major shift by our city away from the “privatizing” or “outsourcing” model that has reigned in urban America for more than 20 years.
“There’s been a bias in too many places at using folks outside the public sector for certain city functions,” Shorris said Thursday. “We want to get away from a reliance on outsourcing things that don’t need to be outsourced.”
The information revolution, Shorris noted, has so dramatically changed government operations that “technology is really a core function for us. That means we need to become more reliant on our own staff to execute technology functions.”
The new agreement calls for shifting several job categories typically handled by outside consultants — “Help Desk Support,” “Network Technician,” “Business Analyst,” and “Programmer” — to regular city positions.
It also calls for hiring new highly-skilled technicians for an “Insource Pool” at the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and creating special interagency teams.
“We want to create a pool of people that we can send from one agency to another and assign to specific projects,” Shorris said.
The agreement is a big success for union chief Henry Garrido, who assumed leadership of District Council 37 when Lillian Roberts, its longtime head, retired in December.
“I’ve always said city workers can compete if they’re given the right opportunity,” Garrido said. “We applaud the mayor for stopping the huge waste of taxpayer dollars.”
At the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene alone, officials expect to save $26 million by “contracting in for IT services and reduction of temporary workers,” the documents show.
So all those claims we heard for decades about private companies providing government services better and cheaper than city workers were just that — claims.
After the scandal of CityTime and the massive cost overruns on the 911 system, de Blasio wants public employees providing public services.
No revolutionary concept, just common sense.
