Accountability
Seattle leaders have lost all sense of accountability. We saw this with the Pronto Bike program where our leaders were given information showing the program was a failure and the number of users were half of what they were originally told. Yet, they bought the failed program anyway. Seattle City Light's billing program is $34 million over budget. Our city leaders were unaware of these issues before it was too late. Our seawall is over budget by $70 million. What is the reaction from our city leaders? Nothing. To them, this is business as usual, and all they need to do is ask for more tax dollars.
Under my leadership, this will end.
Solutions
The following list of solutions is a strong start to bring transparency and accountability to our broken system:
- All contracts and budgets will immediately be made public and available for inspection by all citizens.
- Every contract will have cost control and periodic audits to ensure we maintain real-time awareness of each contract performance.
- All contracts will have a claw-back mechanism that will target wasteful and abusive practices.
- We will move to eliminate the abusive practice of "end-of-contract spending sprees" where contractors purposely spend government's money in order to fully exhaust the contract.
- We will develop a contractor scoring system where efficiency in contract spending is heavily weighted in future contract awards.
- All contract performance data will be captured and evaluated. We will only invest in strategies and contractors that successfully perform.
- We will always leverage technology and innovations to reduce costs, improve performance, and become more efficient.
