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The Barras Report MR. Global Warming and former Vice President Al Gore is a man who doesn’t mind taking a risk. Consider his recent endorsement of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama.
After umpteen caucuses and primaries, the “Meta Male” stood before a screaming crowd, filled with a lethal quotient of environmentalists and declared he’s with Barack. Barack is his man. And everyone is happy to have him join the team. Better late than never.
Now comes the equally daring Jim McGrath. The head of the District’s tenant advocacy group TENAC announced that his organization is, guess what? You got: with Barack Obama.
“The election of Barack Obama as president will end two great national nightmares: (1) the Bush presidency, the greatest catastrophe this country has suffered since the Civil War, and (2) the last gasp of lingering racism and Jim Crow in this country. If there are two greater causes than those, we would like to know what they are,” McGrath said in a written statement release earlier last week.
“Apropos the old Christmas jingle, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Obama,’ the most gifted candidate for president we have seen in a long time. For us, that choice is obvious,” he added
Does that endorsement now mean that hundreds of thousands of District tenants, who, if registered, voted in February, can finally declare their allegiance? TBR has to think the fact that the Illinois senator actually won every precinct in the District in the democratic primary has to mean that tenants and a whole bunch of folks got the “support Obama” memo before McGrath and TENAC.
But things aren’t over until the fat lady dances on top the bar. So, maybe McGrath and Gore still matter.
IT’S YOUR MONEY EVEN before Mayor Adrian M. Fenty effected his Executive Order 2008-81 on June 5, 2008, the city’s Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra was assuming personnel authority usually accorded the Department of Human Resources. The CTO working with the Office of Contracting and Procurement (OCP) had issued a request for proposal for help with hiring temporary workers.
According to OCP Chief David Gragan and Kundra the $150 million, multiyear contract calls for a company to provide IT staff on an as needed basis to the OCTO. The prime contractor would subcontract with “certified businesses” in the District that would actually recruit the workers. Resumes of those workers would be funneled to the prime contractor, who then would send them to the OCTO.
Raise your hand if this sounds to you like a needlessly time-consuming and costly method for recruiting and selecting workers.
The OCP has opted for not one but multiple middlemen. Further, the city’s human resources office has the capacity to perform the job that OCTO wants to pay private companies million of public dollars to do.
“We have a contract with a headhunter to help us identify [candidates] for hard to fill positions,’ said Diana Haines-Walton, deputy director at the Department of Human Resources.
Wait. Wait. The DHR is spending public money already to find candidates for positions like those at the OCTO. And now, the city will spend another $150 millions to duplicate that effort.
Does anyone in the District government understand there is a near recession knocking on the city’s door?
In fairness, OCP Chief Gragan has done several things to reform the long plagued contracting office. He created an office of ethics and realigned the management structure so that it focuses on services or commodities and not other government agencies, which allows for more efficient and effective contracting. He has put a stop to ratifications, which were the result of spending on contracts before the agreements had been properly approved. And, he has enforced the “three-quote” rule, ensuring that a contractor isn’t selected from the “supply schedule” simply because the company is an agency favorite. But there is far more mess to clean up. And, Gragan has to be careful the cure doesn’t become the cancer.
The so-called “staff augmentation” appears to be just that, to say nothing of a step backward when waste, fraud and abuse were the order of the day, and District residents got stuck with the bill.
Gragan said such contracts are “best practices” and the “industry standard.” He said he wants to do more to cover all the temp worker needs of every agency in the government.
Someone stop him, quickly!
Small business owners who are potential subcontractors are worried about this new model. They complain that the prime contractor will filter worker resumes and could end up placing its family, friends and friends of friends in positions rather than the most qualified individual.
“There is a little bit of fear of the unknown,” said Gragan last week. “Our goal is to prove to the supplier community that this is good for them.”
But, is it good for District residents?
Further, government sources said that Kundra is firing individuals claiming he wants to save money at the same time he is attempting to hire temporary workers. It’s a three-card Monty game. He also is being accused of discrimination, bringing in friends from his old stomping grounds in Virginia—many of them are Indian, morphing the office into an “outsourcing outpost. “
Kundra denied that charge. “ We’ve been extremely diverse. We stretched at across the organization making sure we attract the best.”
The technology chief said his office has participated in government-sponsored job-fairs and has recruited workers through that process. He said recruiting through the staff augmentation contract and working with the DHR is not mutually exclusive.
“It’s an issue of velocity and being able to respond [quickly] to the needs,” Kundra added.
Does that mean that DHR can’t act with urgency?
COURIOUSER AND COURIOUSER
FIRST the University of the District of Columbia Board of Trustees suspended its presidential search. Then, it extended it to June 27, according to government sources. Now, Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray has scheduled a public roundtable for Wednesday June 25 (Room 123 at the John A. Wilson Building) to get a “status report” on the search. This follows a letter from the Faculty Senate that urged the board to start all over again. The senate steering committee felt none of the candidates that had interviewed was qualified to run the city’s only public university.
Meanwhile, sources tell TBR the board discussed earlier this month selling or razing one of its principal assets—Building 52 which sits on Connecticut Ave near the Van Ness subway station. It’s surprising that a school struggling to take its place along side flourishing private institutions in the city would decide to sell a significant piece of real estate.
TBR wrote earlier this year that some board members had their sights on the property and had discussed privately the possibility of securing for select individuals a commission from the sale. It is unclear how the transaction will be handled.
But since the chairman is stepping up to help the troubled university, he may want to ask why, why, why? And who, who, who—as in who stands to benefit
SIDESHOWS AND SOUVENIRS
SPEAKING of those all-important endorsements, At-Large Councilmember Kwame Brown rushed to announce that the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club has announced its support of his reelection bid.
The Gertrude Stein Democrats represent the community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Democrats in the District. Each election cycle its endorsement is one of the most highly sought among candidates. But TBR isn’t sure how much clout the organization actually has in swaying the votes of its members when they arrive at the polls.
Besides, choosing an incumbent isn’t dangerous. But then, council incumbents, thus far this election cycle, don’t seem to have anything to worry about from the opposition. Most of the challengers have raised very little money and they aren’t practicing the brand of aggressive retail politics that swept Mayor Fenty into office.
Brown won his seat on the council mimicking the relentless door-to-door campaign Fenty used to ouster longtime Ward 4 pol Charlene Drew Jarvis. He proved that unseating an incumbent is more than a notion. You have to start early, work late, and wear out a couple of pair of shoes.
Ward 8 civic leader and firebrand Phil Pannell, himself a member of the Stein Club who advocated Brown’s endorsement, also is running for office. Pannell is collecting signatures to qualify him for the ballot in the September Primary as shadow delegate.
TBR doesn’t understand why Pannell won’t take the plunge and run against D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who has been around so long she seems to have forgot whom she represents. Last week, she announced she would actively work against the interest of thousands of children and their families, who are the recipients of Opportunity Scholarships also known as vouchers.
Norton for NEA president!
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