Politics

San Diego City Council Approves Mayor's First Outsourcing Proposal

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published April 12, 2010 at 3:08 PM PDT

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

San Diego City Council has approved the mayor’s proposal to outsource part of the city's IT department. The vote marks a step toward the mayor’s goal of using managed competition to outsource city services, if it saves money.

A Los Angeles company, En Pointe won the contract to run the city’s IT help desk services. En Pointe’s bid will save the city about a million dollars a year, though council members questioned whether transition costs and monitoring costs might erode those savings.

Council President Ben Hueso said the contract will be reviewed by council in a year before it is renewed.

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"I’ll support this today but with a lot of skepticism," Heuso said. "And make sure the council does hold the contractor to their word, to their performance schedule and that we do hopefully save money on this in the future."

Councilwoman Sheri Lightner was the lone dissenting vote. She said it does not make sense to outsource San Diego jobs to companies whose workers live in L.A or India.

The mayor’s office will develop proposals to outsource more IT functions that Data Processing Services has performed for the past 30 years.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.