The fact that no state other than Oregon has yet made any effort to make sure contractors are held to high standards of quality job creation is particularly alarming in light of the fact that such standards are specifically required under the recovery plan and overwhelmingly demanded by the American people.
The section of ARRA outlining the federal Accountability and Transparency Board requires that, as a condition of further funding, all state governments report quarterly on the number of jobs created by contractors. In a January poll by Lake Research Partners, 76% of Americans said they considered it "extremely" or "very important" that state governments maintain websites tracking “what companies and government agencies are getting funds, for what purposes, and the number and quality of jobs being created.”
The upshot is clear: making contractors report the number and quality of jobs they create isn’t just a matter of ethical niceties. It is a matter of sheer political and economic necessity. If Oregon moves to enact HB 2037, it will be in a strong position to fund more projects when further federal funding becomes available. If it doesn’t, lawmakers will face the prospect of dwindling funds alongside a rightly irate public.
If the goal of transparency is to be able to give money to projects that work and take it away from ones that don’t, the urgency of applying this dictum to private contractors has become all the more apparent in recent years. Transportation and health and human services projects are two of the central focuses of federal recovery funding. And increasingly, states have been outsourcing these projects to private contractors, with often-disastrous results.
In 2006, the private firm Accenture suffered a database crash that caused 30,000 children to drop off the rolls of Texas’s Children’s Health Insurance Program. Last year, Indiana called off a deal with IBM to deliver that state’s welfare benefits after 59 of the state’s 92 counties claimed it had become more difficult for citizens to obtain benefits. In Massachusetts, outsourcing oversight of the notorious Big Dig construction project to Bechtel has resulted in millions of dollars of wasted taxpayer money and even the loss of a life.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, the state’s Department of Administrative Services estimates that Oregon spent over $4 billion on private contracts in just the last 22 months, with approximately 40% of Portland-area Multnomah County’s budget going toward private contracts. With such colossal failures piling up in other states, Oregonians are entitled to demand that they receive quality work that creates quality jobs in exchange for the huge amounts of money they are increasingly shelling out.
Last Thursday, in an address about the need to reform federal defense contracts, which last year created cost overruns of as much as 24% and wasted as much as $40 billion in taxpayer cash, President Obama put it quite eloquently, "The American people's money must be spent to advance their priorities - not to line the pockets of contractors or to maintain projects that don't work." The same principle should apply in the states as it does to the federal government.
As they move to direct over $6.48 billion in recovery funds toward “shovel-ready” projects in the next few months, Oregon lawmakers - and state lawmakers around the country - face a choice. They can either shovel money directly into the pockets of corporations that give no assurances of creating decent-paying jobs, or they can put measures in place to ensure that money goes into the hands of the hard working families who have been hardest hit by the recession.
If they move to pass HB 2037, they will have made a bold and decisive move in the right direction and set an example for the rest of the nation to follow.
|
STATE BLOGS
