City’s Transportation Bureau Paid Contractor $299,000 to Develop App It Won’t Use
Summary
But in a letter to volunteers yesterday, bureau officials conceded they were canceling the contract—and would not get the city’s money back. “We have made the difficult decision to terminate our contract with the software vendor that was developing the [app]....The software vendor was not able to meet our needs on numerous occasions during key milestones of the project,” wrote Renata Tirta, a division manager for the bureau, in a Nov. 27 letter obtained by WW. “We could not in good faith deliver our services reliably, timely, or consistently using the software solution this vendor was developing.” The city will not recoup the $299,000 it spent on the app, bureau spokeswoman Hannah Schafer says. After a competitive bid process, PBOT chose a software development company called RideShark, which appears to be headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Tirta added in her letter Monday that the bureau didn’t realize just how expensive the software would be to use on an ongoing basis, and that the city arrived at its decision to terminate the contract “after exhausting every avenue to course-correct the arrangement.” The failed contract is yet another financial hit for the floundering Transportation Bureau, which next year faces a $32 million budget deficit due to declining parking revenues and gas taxes—two funding sources that will all but certainly tumble even more in years to come.