Whopper

Albert Einstein is supposed once to have defined Insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Sounds like he spent some time in Trenton!

Actually, according to a neighborhood urban legend, one of his good friends in the area was the Federal Judge who swore him in as a US citizen, who happened to live in Cadwalader Heights in the house next door to us. According to that legend, Albert Einstein used to visit the good judge frequently, and partake of the neighborhood hospitality for which our local corner of the Delaware Valley is widely famed.

It may not be a true story, but I can certainly visualize the Professor, smoking his pipe as he rocked back and forth on the front porch on our neighbor’s porch, shaking his head sadly as he’d intone in his low Germanic voice, “Das  Tony Mack, ist zo KRAAAAZY!!!“

Trying to find some humor in this situation is the only way I can approach this story and hope to stay same myself: Having totally screwed up the process of bidding out the City’s Information Technology services last year, and getting swatted down by a Judge in the process, the Mack Administration is taking another bite at the poisoned apple, attempting to coerce an “emergency” IT contract with South Jersey Technology Park (SJTP), a unit of the Sterling Regional High School District, and attempting to eject the current contractor, ADPC, ten days before the completion of its current contract after 25 uninterrupted years of service.

This attempt to get SJTP in is a Joke, pure and simple. I attended last Thursday night’s meeting of City Council, at which SJTP made a presentation. In short, it did not go well. The SJTP reps did not make a very clear case for their background, their skills or the financial benefits of a proposed deal. The rep could not satisfactorily answer the simplest of questions from Council members. And, after Council President George Muschal challenged the rep by telling him that he had contacted several of the Professional References on a list provided by SJTP, and they had not checked out, the representative kind of stuttered something to the effect that “We’re not very good at Marketing, we’re a Technical firm.”

Despite this performance, and the clear signal from Council that they were not going to approve any deal with SJTP, No Way, No How, the firm showed up this weekend with mayoral aide and one-man wrecking crew Anthony Roberts to demand passwords and other access to the City’s IT structure from ADPC, saying the City had signed an “emergency” 40-day contract with SJTP. ADPC rightly refused.

A little more background. You may remember back in February, Judge Linda Feinberg voided the City’s previous attempt to contract with an IT firm, Lynx Technology. In her ruling on the matter, Judge Feinberg employed much colorful language when describing the city’s compliance with the required purchasing and contracting laws in the Lynx deal.  Adjectives such as “sloppy” and “insufficient” were used, as well as the summary statement that “…this bid, if properly evaluated in the first place, would not have made it to council for a vote one time, let alone two times.”

No matter. Lesson Unlearned!

The City is trying again. When the state Department of Community Affairs (DCA) heard two days before Council’s deliberation this deal was in the works, DCA Director of Local Government Services wrote a letter to the Mayor and Council telling them to go slow before any deal could be made: “A careful review must be completed before we agree to consider this contract,” he wrote. (Thanks to Robert Chilson for posting several original documents for this story online!)

This request was apparently ignored. In this morning’s Times article, Mayor Mack ups the ante, and argues that DCA has no jurisdiction in the matter at all: “‘DCA has no authority over that aspect of appointing contracts,’ Mack said. ‘Transitional Aid does not cover shared services, so we have a right to appoint whomever we want to under the MOU[Memorandum of Understanding].’”

The Mayor omitted to say, or perhaps has forgotten, that the terms of the Transitional Aid MOU specifically allow DCA authority over any and all aspects of the City’s Financial Affairs, including shared services.

Also, in case a reminder is needed, the City filed a “Contract Request Form” with DCA on June 14, the first paragraph of which states,

“The Municipality [Trenton] agreed to obtain the Director’s written approval for the hiring of consultants and professionals, either directly or knowingly through a sub-contract, regardless of cost.”

Oh, that Contract Request Form was signed by the Mayor. And Business Administrator Eric Berry. And City Chief Financial Officer Janet Schoenhaar. People who should know better.

DCA has already recently told the City that its behavior threatens future Transitional Aid awards, but the Mayor and his Administration seem not to care, by flaunting this deal.

The Administration also jeopardizes its relationship with the State by the way it does its Arithmetic. I did title this piece “Whopper,” right? Well, in the case it made to the State, Anthony Roberts made a Whopper of a mistake in a memo to Director Neff.

Attempting to demonstrate the potential savings from the SJTP deal, Roberts stated that the City stood to save anywhere from $891,050 or $967,000 in the second year of a deal with SJTP, compared with the similar propossals from Lynx or ADPC.

Considering that the total annual amount of the proposed deal with SJTP is only $850,000 in the first place, how can we possibly save $900,000 in year 2? Easy: Roberts added Year 1 and Year 2 costs together, coming up with a total exceeding $1,741,000 and called that amount Year 2!!

I kid you not. That’s like adding your income last year to this year and saying that’s what you’re bringing home in 2011.

I guarantee you, not one of my daughter’s sixth grade classmates would have made that mistake. But this mistake made by Mr. Roberts was not caught by anyone else in the City. Not BA Berry. Not CFO Schoenhaar

That is simple arithmetic, not any of the kinds of Higher Mathematics that Professor Einstein employed to describe the rest of the natural universe outside the boundaries of the Capital City of New Jersey.  Here, we have trouble with simple Addition and Subtraction.

What a Whopper of a Mistake!

I’ll leave you with another mental image of The Professor, sipping a cool glass of lemonade on the porch on a warm summer evening, sighing once and staring into the middle distance. “Venn vill dieses Jokers get a Fucking Clue? Ach! Never!!”