City Council recently passed new requirements for open-end professional services contracts, a type of contract with the city in which “the City engages a consultant on an as-needed basis without a pre-determined quantity of services required or guarantee of work.” Such contracts are no longer allowed to be extended past three years, and the city can no longer spend more than $500,000 on them (down from a $1,000,000 limit before). The city will write quarterly reports about these contracts, including the name of the vendor, the number of hours for which their services have been used, and the deliverable. Exemptions from the competitive process for getting city contracts were also narrowed. Now, the City Solicitor must sign off on all no-bid contracts.
In June 2022, the City of Pittsburgh awarded such a contract to Matrix Consulting Group to do a police staffing report for $180,000. This report was tasked with, among other things, suggesting staffing changes that would optimize the current police budget. Matrix Consulting Group is based in San Francisco, with offices throughout America. The report 175-page report was completed in July 2023. It suggested that Pittsburgh had enough police officers but should requisition some to be “Community Resource Officers” and some to investigative units, because proactive time was high to the point of diminishing returns. The report also suggested that “12-15% of calls for service can be diverted to a new civilian alternative response program,” and that patrols were staffed excessively.
This report was controversial mainly because the police department, and Pittsburgh police officers in general, did not agree that there was enough staffing slack such that anyone should be reclassified as a “Community Resource Officer,” or that patrols were staffed excessively. The report also states that Matrix began work on the contract in March of 2022, which was regarded as suspicious because they were not awarded the contract until June. However, Matrix has said that this was a typo, and that they did not begin billable work before the start of the contract. It became clear that this contract had been awarded with a waiver of competitive process, using the exception that Matrix Consulting was the only group who did this sort of work, though this was not strictly true—according to the Post-Gazette, “the International Association of Chiefs completed a similar study for the city in 2005.”
In August, District Attorney Stephen Zappala requested all records related to this contract and later requested records on all no-bid contracts. In a press release, Zappala said that his office has heard “from public and private officials” who are concerned about public safety. The City Council also looked into the matter, which led to their recent change in the legislation. The new legislation changes will not affect the controversial study that inspired them, but they will apply to similar projects going forward.
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