Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Riverside County’s deal with KPMG is old news and skips employee input

Blog note: This Letter to the Editor, printed in the Riverside Press-Enterprise refers to an earlier article about a Riverside County Grand Jury report.

Re “What did Riverside County get for $35 million consultant”? (Aug. 19):

The recently published grand jury report on the results (or lack thereof) of Riverside County’s deal with KPMG is old news to anyone who works for Riverside County.

For years, SEIU 721 members like myself have been sounding the alarm that the KPMG experiment was a waste of time that undermined its own stated goals.

In no universe was throwing away nearly $35 million on an outside consultant ever going to save the county money.

Instead of working with county staff members, who understand all the ins and outs of serving our county’s 2.5 million residents, to identify ways to improve efficiency, county leadership instead quarreled with workers constantly and eagerly pursued KPMG’s “cost savings” ideas.

It’s fitting that the legacy of our former county supervisors, who preached “fiscal responsibility” to squeeze every penny they could out of hardworking public servants, is a $43 million black hole (once you factor in the cancelled software contract) that did nothing for the people of Riverside County.

At least they have 50,000 pages of useless analysis to keep them occupied in retirement.

— David Warpness, La Quinta

August 24, 2020

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