By Matthew Hirsch

San Francisco city officials have traditionally used no-bid contracts to reward political supporters, a practice that wasted millions of taxpayer dollars but was shrouded in secrecy despite the best efforts of open-government advocates and the Bay Guardian. Now top city officials are starting to pry into that shady practice.

The system for awarding and tracking sole-source contracts – which are ostensibly allowed only during emergencies or when just one company has the expertise to do a particular job – was criticized as wasteful and difficult to document in a report last year by City Controller Ed Harrington.

Since Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered new reporting on the contracts a week after taking office, the Controller's Office has been collecting data on new and ongoing sole-source contracts from each department. Mark Tipton of the office's audits division told us a database would soon be uploaded to the city's Web site, www.sfgov.org.

As of June 14, all but five departments had filed their sole-source contract lists, Tipton said. The five that haven't are the Asian Art Museum, the Assessor-Recorder's Office, the Juvenile Probation Department, the Port of San Francisco, and the Department on the Status of Women.

Those departments are now in the sights of Sunshine Ordinance Task Force member Doug Comstock, who has pledged to have the task force question representatives from every agency not reporting its sole-source contracts.

"Sole-source contracting is a major hole in our budget process, and we need to assure the public that all these contracts are on the up-and-up. The only way we can do that is to have these departments file them so the public can scrutinize them," Comstock told us.

Before Newsom's Jan. 15 directive, the one citywide requirement on sole-source contracts had been a clause in the Sunshine Ordinance instructing every department to turn over a list of such contracts to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors at the end of each fiscal year.

But Harrington found that only 19 departments filed a sole-source report, leaving more than 50 that hadn't. The year before, a Bay Guardian investigation found that 35 departments failed to file sole-source contract lists for fiscal year 2001 (see "Shady Dealings," 6/14/02).

A package of amendments to the Sunshine Ordinance, to be heard later this month by the Board of Supervisors' Rules Committee, includes a proposal to make requirements for reporting sole-source contracts more stringent, similar to what Newsom instituted in January.

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