City contracting process - fair, honest enforcement

By Steve Williams

"I will ensure that the City contracting process is enforced fairly and honestly. The City Attorney must "approve all contracts as to form," but that approval process often has failed to adhere to City and State laws regarding the solicitation and competitive award processes. That won't happen when I'm the City Attorney." - Steve Williams

I believe that San Francisco has sufficient safeguards in place regarding the fair, competitive, and open awarding of public contracts. When elected, I will enforce these State and municipal laws in all phases of public contracts: the public solicitation effort, the competitive award process, and the contract enforcement period - the term of the agreements.

As the City Attorney, I will take the following actions:

• Ask for a review of all City contracts awarded within the past two years - as well as all contracts worth over one million dollars - to ascertain whether they were awarded within prescribed City and state laws.

• Seek to rescind or revoke those contracts that were improperly awarded.

• Seek to terminate those costly contracts that are not being managed within their prescribed terms and conditions.

• Recommend against the renewal or extension of those contracts and leases that may have been awarded within the technical limits of the law, but were awarded under suspicious or questionable circumstances.

• Recommend revisions too the city contracting processes after a two-year review of the present regimen.

• Recommend safeguards to prevent current and past office-holders from pressing and lobbying decision-makers for a fee.

"Mayor Willie Brown shut down a 1998 probe into alleged abuses of the City's minority contracting program at San Francisco International Airport and fired a City commissioner for pressing the matter, according to testimonuy in a City hearing." - San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2001.

"The fact is that anybody who wants to do projects in the City has to hire a whole bunch of people, that's been going on for years." - Denise McCarty, SF Port Commissioner,as quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 2001.