Fresh from his election victory last night, City Commissioner Dan Saltzman has slammed fellow Commissioner Randy Leonard’s budget request for a $5million loan from the city’s general fund to pay for a new computer system at Leonard’s permitting bureau. Saltzman said he didn’t see how it could be justified.

“We’re not so much in a recession as we are, in the middle of a downside in the business cycle,” said Leonard.

“While I accept that we do operate in cycles, there may never be another building boom like we witnessed over the last four or five years in Portland,” said Saltzman. We need a thorough, independent analysis of this loan, he added.

“And we agree to that,” said Leonard. “But people who come in to get permits deserve to have a modernized permit system. This will allow us to do that.”

The police bureau just took $3million in cuts, remember.

Matt Davis was news editor of the Mercury from 2009 to May 2010.

15 replies on “Saltzman Slams Leonard’s $5million Computer”

  1. “We’re not so much in a recession as we are, in the middle of a downside in the business cycle,” said Leonard.

    This recession is just starting. They ought to be pinching every last dime they can. Next year the revenue picture is going to be much worse.

  2. Matt can you get some more details on this “computer”? The headline states “computer” but the article states “computer system”, and there are differences.

    A “computer system” can be terribly complex and have many, many different computers within, and those easily go for $5M (and more).

    If it’s just a computer, I don’t care if it’s a mainframe of some sort, it cannot and will not cost $5M so there’s something rotten in Denmark.

    Let me know if you can get me some details. I’m dying to know. 🙂

  6. Anyone who has ever worked for government in any capacity knows that whatever it is they are seeking to upgrade has been hopelessly shabby and run-down long before it got to the point where someone with their neck on the line politically finally asked for the requisite huge sum of money.

    In short, people who gripe about government inefficiency while hysterically screaming about “out of control” government expenses need to STFU.

    I have a feeling they’re not requesting 2000 MacBook Pros.

  7. If you are going to shoot, shoot to kill. Looks like Saltzman is going to be around a while and he is going to make Adam’s and Leonard’s life a living hell. Let the cat fights ensue.

  8. My understanding is that they want to purchase a complete system, software and hardware, for an integrated permitting system. Last I heard, they looked at the system being used by Salt Lake City and decided that was the one they wanted to buy. I’m not sure if Salt Lake City developed and owns the system, or if Salt Lake purchased it from another vendor.

    The reason I know about it is I tried to get an opportunity to bid on the system but COP wasn’t interested in custom development.

  11. Whatever it is that this software does, I’m pretty much decided that they’re overpaying. There’s a lot of smart cookies that’ll build this kind of thing from scratch for a tenth of that cost easy.

  13. @Anony Mouse: Really smart cookies usually work for a company (or have their own) who could do this kind of thing but would still cost a lot of money. Be wary of the smart technically inclined cookies who are super awesome at what they do but haven’t managed to make it lucrative.

  14. And jesus cripes stay away from custom development!

    They’ll have to maintain the system for years and years – if its’ some scraggly custom code developed by someone who is long gone, fixing it or enhancing it can be an expensive nightmare.

    My company is full of engineers, so they spent the ’90s developing thousands of custom systems. It got to the point where none of the systems talked to each other, half of them were written in obsolete languages and couldn’t be fixed, and no one remembered what system did what. It’s taking us years and millions of bucks to scrap them and move to off-the-shelf systems.

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