The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Today's Front Page

September 6, 2010

State workers sue over tech jobs

By Lawrence Messina Associated Press

CHARLESTON — Long-simmering concerns among West Virginia’s state employees about public technology jobs have boiled over into a legal challenge.

The West Virginia Public Workers Union Local 170 has sued the state’s Office of Technology and its chief technology officer. It seeks to block Kyle Schafer and his agency from proposing any contracts that could outsource tech-related projects or jobs.

State officials aren’t commenting on the pending case. Gov. Joe Manchin and other state officials have previously said they’re not trying to privatize public jobs.

“I do not endorse layoffs for the sake of outsourcing,” the governor told The Associated Press when asked about the subject in July. “That’s not what we have to do to run a responsible government, and we’ve not run government that way.”

But the Manchin administration also counts cutting costs and improving program efficiency among its top goals. Affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union, Local 170 has previously complained that Manchin has allowed scores of state jobs to remain unfilled once they become vacant. It fears the state may follow the same path with technology slots.

Schafer told lawmakers during last month’s interim meetings that West Virginia has saved millions since 2005 by centralizing technology infrastructure and making it consistent across state government.

Schafer said the state was considering seeking bids on a project to consolidate the writing and modifying of computer programs. Such services are now scattered among 31 different government bodies, costing the state more than $35 million a year, he told legislators.

“To date, not a single technology employee has been laid off or furloughed as a result of previous consolidation efforts,” Schafer’s agency said in an accompanying Aug. 12 statement. “This exercise is expected to be no different.”

The legal challenge, filed last week in Kanawha Circuit Court, argues that Schafer and his office must first satisfy provisions of the 2005 law that overhauled the state’s technology operations.

The legislation requires a wide-ranging, four-year strategic plan for the agency as well as biannual reports, all to be sent to the Legislature. It further calls on the office to compile a study that includes a cost-benefit analysis before pursuing any “major information technology project.”

“They should be doing what the Legislature required them to do before they go beyond that,” said Kevin Baker, who represents Local 170 in the case.

The public workers’ group also warns against the potential downsides to privatization, by citing examples in such states as Texas and neighboring Virginia.

Northrop Grumman Corp. holds a $2.4 billion, 10-year contract with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency to build, operate and maintain the state’s 7-year-old, consolidated computer services bureaucracy. But that project, the largest single-vendor contract in that state’s history, has been plagued by problems.

Legislative audits there have repeatedly criticized its poor and tardy delivery of services, cost overruns and system failures. The situation worsened late last month when a massive outage hampered or derailed online services for 26 of 89 state agencies.

Some 5,000 drivers’ licenses and ID cards expired on one day because the state’s motor vehicle agency could not process renewals at its 74 statewide locations. At the state tax department, the outage prevented taxpayers from filing tax returns and making payments.

As Virginia agencies recover from the system crash, Northrop Grumman has agreed to fund an independent inquiry.

Texas, meanwhile, has been an early advocate of outsourcing state government computer work. It has sought to privatize data storage and other techology-related services through an $863 million, seven-year contract with IBM. But many of the Texas agencies affected have complained that the contract has saved far less than anticipated.

Those agencies cite service backlogs, network breakdowns and a failure to back up data. Texas also suffered a widespread computer outage in 2008 that erased thousands of confidential records in the attorney general’s office.

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