EVERETT — When Snohomish County Councilmen asked Tuesday how much money the county had spent on a electronic document archiving program that has never been used, there were no ready answers.
Thousands? Tens of thousands? More or less? Nobody could say.
Department of information services director Larry Calter and executive director Peter Camp said they would have to get back with information about the cost — and on who authorized spending the money and when.
“We frankly haven’t been able to find any paperwork on it,” Council Chairman Dave Gossett said Wednesday, a day after the lack of answers led to some tense moments during a council operations committee meeting. “It’s one of the various things we’re looking at, and we’re hoping the performance auditor will look at.”
Camp and Calter said they weren’t prepared to answer the questions because they hadn’t been told to research them before the meeting.
The Department of Information Services reports to County Executive Aaron Reardon. The County Council already put Reardon on notice that it was hiring a company to audit the department. The alert came as a formal note attached to the 2010 budget, which passed last month.
The council’s decision to audit the department came after it heard concerns from other elected county officials. Those officials contend their departments are being adversely affected because information technicians are making decisions without talking with them first.
The council on Dec. 14 agreed to hire Seattle accounting and consulting firm Moss Adams LLP for the audit. The contract for up to $50,000 was to be completed within 75 days. Because of an ongoing hiring freeze, the county lacks the in-house staff to do its own performance audit, according to the council.
Depending on what Moss Adams says, the council could by the end of March move the department from Reardon’s office to the supervision of the county auditor, which is a publicly elected position.
Reardon has objected to that idea, saying such a transfer makes no sense.
Moving the department would be a big undertaking. Information services includes about 100 budgeted positions and a $21.6 million budget. Among other things, the department is responsible for keeping the county’s computer networks operating and performs many of the same duties as information technology staff at private businesses.
Tuesday’s questions about the document archiving system came up during a discussion about countywide policies governing how long employees need to keep documents, including e-mails and other electronic files.
Camp and Calter told the council those responsibilities are largely being left up to individual employees.
When councilmen asked what happened to a plan for a centralized electronic archive, or “vaulting system,” the officials from the executive’s office said it was tested and technicians decided not to put it to use.
To bring the system online would have required holding discussions with all of the county’s elected leaders and the employee unions in order to craft new policies about saving documents, Camp and Calter said.
Councilman John Koster reasoned that, with those issues unresolved, why would county technicians bother to buy, install and test the system at all?
“Nobody can answer when it was authorized, by whom it was authorized, how much it cost,” said Koster, the operations committee chairman. “And you did all of this knowing that it wasn’t in line with our current policies? That piece of it alone to me is a little bit egregious.”
Koster also asked, “How much time and resources did we spend on a system that we don’t know that we’re going to implement countywide?”
The Department of Information Services is in the process of gathering the costs and other information, Reardon’s spokesman, Christopher Schwarzen, said Wednesday. He expects it could take up to 10 days to have the answers.
Noah Haglund: 425-339-3465, nhaglund@heraldnet.com.
See the flap
Here’s a link to the public hearing Tuesday where Snohomish County councilmen didn’t get answers to questions about the county’s computer system: http://tinyurl.com/yanru6t.
Most of the friction surfaces at 31:40 into the hearing.
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