The State Worker: From the notebook: More about vendor contracts

The State Worker

Chronicling civil-service life for California state workers

June 9, 2009

From the notebook: More about vendor contracts

A few bits of info that didn't get into today's story about Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tightening down on state vendor contracts:

-- Professional Engineers in California Government, which represents the state's unionized engineers at CalTrans and elsewhere, issued a statement supporting the governor's order. Click here to read it.

-- The Department of General Services told us that departments have entered a little more than 12,400 contracts into the system since March 16.

-- There's a huge discrepancy between what the state's estimate of what government spends on vendor contracts and what SEIU Local 1000 researchers have found. Here's a little more detail:

As mentioned in today's story, the State and Consumer Services Agency, figures about $9 billion per year go to vendor contracts. It arrived at that figure by averaging vendor contract payouts since 2005-06 through 2007-08, agency spokeswoman Amanda Fulkerson said Monday afternoon. Fiscal 2007-08 was the peak year for such spending, roughly $14 billion.

SEIU disputes those figures. It recently released a report that claims the state is currently spending $34 billion on vendor contracts. You can see the report by clicking here.

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