Committee to Review Audit of Workload Projections Off 99%

An audit that turned up problems in the first city department to go through the competitive bidding process known as "managed competition" is scheduled to be reviewed by the San Diego City Council's Audit Committee on Monday.

The audit, issued last month, found that workload projections for Publishing Services were artificially inflated, which caused the bidders to propose higher costs than should have been necessary.

A group of municipal employees won the competition with a $2 million annual bid for five years.

While the audit found the total cost has been adhered to, Publishing Services has raised in-house prices to other departments by 15 percent to offset a 58 percent shortfall in the projected workload, the report by the city auditor found.

Managed competition was approved by voters in 2006 and implemented four years later, with an eye toward controlling the city's budget by making departments more efficient. All five of the completed competitions so far have been won by city employees.

Publishing Services handles functions such as website design, graphic design, electronic publishing and administration of the city's photocopiers.

The audit also found that the workload projections were not sufficiently vetted and staff concerns about them were not addressed.

According to the audit, the workers were expected to process 3.8 million forms in Fiscal Year 2012, but instead handled about 43,000, an error rate of 99 percent. A projection of creating 240,000 labels that year ended up being off by 90 percent.

City management has agreed to the auditor's recommendations, which are to reassess projected workloads, staffing needs and resources; ensure that workload projections are adequately vetted; report the new assessments to the mayor and City Council so they can make adjustments; and present business management reports regularly to the City Council or its Budget Committee, and make them available to the public.

Publishing Services, fleet maintenance, landfill operations, street and sidewalk maintenance, and street sweeping went through managed competition until former Mayor Bob Filner put a temporary halt to the process.

Several other departments were preparing for managed competition when Filner took over. It's unclear when the process will resume.

Supporters applaud annual budgetary savings of somewhere between $10 and $12 million, depending on who is making the estimate. Issues have cropped up here and there, with some reports that fleet maintenance employees don't have enough resources to keep up with their workload.

-City News Service