Yachats city manager suspends disputed and expensive work on upgrading websites, computer systems

 

By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews

YACHATS – After getting apprised of a contractor’s work to upgrade the city of Yachats’ website and some digging to find out why some necessary approvals were not followed – city manager Bobbi Price decided this week that a fresh start is in order.

That decision came after a presentation by the contractor – Oregon State University’s Center for Applied Systems and Software – followed by a sometimes terse discussion in getting to the bottom of why a city contract was not followed.

At the urging of councilor Greg Scott, the city council voted in 2021 to contract with CASS to fix some bugs on the city’s website and to provide additional software to bring the site up to speed in several areas.

Scott, who is again resigning from the council this month, has a long history with the city’s computer system. For more than a decade, Scott and his contract programmers at OSU designed and maintained the city’s website and computer systems. But after it became increasingly expensive to maintain and drew an increasing number of complaints from city staff and the public, in 2019 the city went to programs and websites offered by CivicPlus, a national firm that specializes in municipal government work.

But after more than a year of work and $133,388 in charges, OSU’s work drew scrutiny early this year after the finance committee began looking into the increasing costs and no record of required approvals for the work.

The city originally authorized no more than $159,000 to complete the project.  Price and the finance committee met with CASS in February but a miscommunication about expectations resulted in its staff meeting separately with Price before once again talking with the committee Tuesday.

CASS director Carrie Hertel and senior software engineer Mark Clements gave a rundown of the work they have been doing to fix glitches in the city’s software while also merging it with the new software it is developing.

The city currently operates with three websites. Integrating them into one will not be possible, so the plan is to get down to two websites that operate together as seamlessly as possible.

While no one at Tuesday’s meeting was on a hot seat, a few chairs warmed as committee members and Price bore down on how work was approved without required service orders and subsequent sign-off by whichever city manager or interim city managers were in charge at the time.

Committee member Charles Bame-Aldred asked who was directing CASS’s work.

Scott, who attended the meeting, said he functioned as the project manager in interactions with CASS, and that he was acting on behalf of the city managers.

While the conversation veered back into an explanation of CASS’s work, the issue of not having the required service orders and the signed approval of a city manager kept returning.

“The service orders, I think with all the transition with the city managers, became a little less formal,” Hertel said. “We do have some requests in writing for work that we have been doing. And Greg (Scott) was giving (city manager) Heide (Lambert) updates and saying ‘Hey, is this okay to continue the work? So we do have that.”

There was a lot of informal documentation and conversations that happened and it was understandably hard for Lambert to free up time, Hertel added, so Scott became the go-to in ensuring CASS was working on what the city wanted.

Lambert resigned last May after 15 months on the job. Katherine Guenther was the interim manager before her and Rick Sant afterwards.

“So the communication was coming from a city councilor?” Bame-Aldred asked.

“Yes,” Hertel said, to which Scott spoke up to say he was the project manager working directly with the city manager and was not functioning in his role as a council member.

“The city manager was my boss and I didn’t do anything without city manager approval,” Scott said.

Price asked if Scott had the written service orders from the city managers. He said he did not. Price said she was curious about how the contract was being followed.

“A couple of things that caught my eye within this was that the amounts that were contracted for are above the amount for procurement law and that is a red flag for me, and I’m surprised it wasn’t for OSU,” Price said.

Hertel said OSU deals with those kinds of contract amounts all the time so it did not raise any flags. Scott added the state’s statutory language excludes intergovernmental agreements from the normal procurement process.

“The idea is since there is no profit motive that you don’t have to follow the normal procurement process,” Scott said.

Committee chair Tom Lauritzen said he had read those agreements in Oregon contract law and that they only change the scope of dollar amounts that he believes top out at $50,000.

Price interjected to say that a contract amendment from 2022 was for $50,000 and another from 2023 is $75,000 — “which brings that whole contract up to $150,000, which takes it into a whole other level of procurement rules.”

Lauritzen added that Yachats also has municipal ordinances that require council approval for anything over $25,000.

“And I attend most council meetings and I don’t think you came to council and asked for council approval for these contract values,” Lauritzen said to Scott.

“It was in the budget,” Scott said.

“Uh, that’s debatable but …,” Lauritzen began.

“So far as I know it was in the budget,” Scott said. “But that’s not something I monitor.”

“But the requirement to get council approval for a contract over twenty-five grand, did you do that? I don’t think … ” Lauritzen said

“This was all handled through the city manager so that’s not an area where I would have been involved,” Scott said.

Price said “So the city manager would have had to have brought that to council.”

City councilor Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessy, who was also in attendance, then spoke up to clarify things.

“I’m a little confused,” she said to the CASS staff. “So you had a protocol you were supposed to follow – correct?” And Lambert was busy. So the process wasn’t followed, is that what I’m hearing?”

“We still have requests in writing, they just aren’t numbered service orders,” Hertel said.

“But there were specific things you were supposed to do … did you do what you were specifically asked to do in the beginning with the contract?” O’Shaugnessy asked.

“I think that we did, yes,” Hertel said.

“I have a follow up question in regards to the service orders,” Lauritzen said. “You do a lot of this work around the state. Is the informal process of managing service orders consistent or is it specifically related to Yachats?”

Hertel asked for an example.

“Well, you didn’t use them,” Lauritzen said. “You didn’t get the city manager’s approval as the contract required. Do you ignore that requirement in other contracts with other agencies?”

“We have different contracts with different agencies, so none of them operate the same way,” Hertel said.

“That service order language though was in your boilerplate contract,” Lauritzen said. To which Hertel replied “Because I made it for the city of Yachats.”

“Okay, so it’s unique. Interesting,” Lauritzen said.

After a pause, Price said, “It does also look like in our code that if it’s not in the budget, that it needs to go to the city recorder or public works director (who) does need to go to council for anything exceeding $50,000 so you (Scott) had mentioned this was in the budget?”

“I was told it was in the budget,” Scott said, saying that at least one city staff member was aware of that.

The discussion then moved into the vision CASS has in moving forward before Price brought the discussion to an end.

“We have contracts that haven’t been followed,” she said. “And we have work that is good and I do like it. We have three websites. I don’t think we need three websites. … I would like to continue pausing work and see where we go from there. There has been a lot of money spent and I think that we need to make sure that it’s all done correctly.”

It also needs to be in line with the council’s goals for “transparency and effective information sharing, but I don’t know that we are doing that right now,” Price said.

While work is suspended, Price said the best step for the city is to get staff involved to really analyze what is needed and then open a request for proposal process, which CASS is invited to apply.

“I think it would be good for us to start fresh, fresh contracts, fresh working orders, and have an official RFP process,” she said. “I want to make sure that we are following all of our rules and laws and things like that.”

• Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com