I attended the 1st Annual Burtie Awards at the State Capitol today. ODOT was the "proud" winner of two Burtie Awards. The first Burtie went to the Office of Project Delivery for the Heather Catron fiasco involving Parametrix. If you are not familiar with this story, Heather worked for Parametrix prior to taking a job with ODOT. She continued to work for Parametrix part-time while working for ODOT and funneled over 70% of the out-sourced projects to her other employer. When her duel employment was brought out into the open, Heather left ODOT and went back to Parametrix full time working on the projects she guided to their company.
The second Burtie was awarded to the Bridge department for their brilliant plan of hiring contractors to do bridge repairs and constantly paying for overruns on many of the projects. No one at ODOT Bridge seems to care that the costs are higher than what was bid. We care and want something done to stop these out landish overruns.
These two and the other Burties awarded to other agencies are wake up calls to our legislature to deal with the major out-sourcing issues. There were about 100 people attending the event. From what I could tell, there were about 5 0r 6 ODOT employees attending. Myself and another Financial Services employee, Shannon Jackson, took signs pointing out the pathetic 1% raise the management team has offered. Need to keep putting this in the public light. Fox News was filming the event along with a couple of print reporters. I believe the Statesman Journal may have been one. I'll let you know if anything is printed.
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Michael - that's an intersting story, but not true. The Secretary of State Audit Division was gunning for the ODOT OTIA Bridge Program even before the contract was signed with the Oregon Bridge Delivery Partners (OBDP). They were trying to turn the program, which has won at least three national awards for innovation and excellence to date, into the Oregon "Big Dig." They stormed into OBDP's offices and gathered up boxes of documents and spent months (not to mention hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars) finding nothing. So they stormed into the Office of Project Delivery Offices (informed by disgruntled ODOT employees) and gathered up boxes of documents and again spent months and more taxpayer money finding nothing. To justify all this time and money, they published an audit finding/management report filled with opinions and conjecture from people who were allowed to say whatever they wanted... No substantiation or any level of validation. If more than one person said something, it was considered good enough. Those accussed were not even given an opportunity to respond (seems a bit unAmerican). The SOS Audit Division justifies it's existence by "finding" wrong doing in State Agencies and once they start looking, they have to produce something.
If you're looking for the next Burtie nominee, you don't have to look any further than your neighbor on the Capital mall.
Well, intheknow seems to have some inside info... as a long time ODOT employee, I know that things are not always as they seem, so I don't doubt the possibility that the SOS is out of control. But back to this whole outsourcing thing. It's crazy. First, the state should be careful with using much higher paid workers who don't even know the basics about our systems or our work. Consultants, especially engineers, are way over paid for what they do. The companies charge the state 2 to 4 times above their workers' salaries and justify it as overhead and profit. I wish I could add all that to my monthly timesheet!!
Second, if the state is going to keep using consultants, they should have a unit dedicated to managing them and not expect the procurement staff to do it. These people are over worked and under paid and need help.
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