Local News

Tuesday, July 25, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

Failed computer system will cost $3.7 million to kill

by Roberto Sanchez Seattle Times staff reporter The Metropolitan King County Council approved a $3.7 million proposal yesterday to pull the plug on the county's new finance computer system, pushing the total for the failed project to more than $40 million.

The amount is less than the $8.4 million that Executive Ron Sims requested to shut down the project and salvage the pieces that work. Council members said they could not trust numbers from Sims' office because of the budget overruns and delays in the project over the past two years.

"I'm not sure what to believe," said Councilman Rob McKenna, R-Bellevue. "I just know we are going to have a lot of software we can't use and a lot of hardware we might as well unplug."

Councilman Greg Nickels, D-West Seattle, said, "I have no confidence, no confidence, that the approach that is being taken on this project today is superior to what it was a year ago or two years ago."

The vote was 12-1 with Kent Pullen, R-Kent, opposed.

About $3.2 million of the $3.7 million total will go to fix bugs and train people running the only part of the $38 million system that has been installed, a PeopleSoft payroll system that writes checks for about 6,000 of the county's 19,000 employees. That system has been riddled with errors since it went online in June 1999, and the county only manages to put out checks every two weeks thanks to a team of consultants and overtime from its payroll employees.

The remaining money will go to plan how to revive the entire project later, and to index and document work on the other half of the project, a computer system to run the county's accounting and general finances. That project operates on an accounting package from SAP, which is based in Walldorf, Germany. The project had been on budget for most of the year and fell behind only after the payroll side ran into problems. Some of its elements were about 80 percent complete before the county ran out of money.

David Martinez, the project manager overseeing the shutdown, said the project needs more money to safely store the SAP work. Thousands of pages of work need to be properly cataloged so that if the county later decides to revive the project, the team doing so will be able to make sense of it.

King County has been trying to upgrade its finance and payroll computers since 1997, a year after it merged with the old Metro agency. The county and its former Metro employees still rely on four older computer systems, some using 20-year-old software, to handle separate payrolls and accounting. Those systems - though they have been moved to modern, stable machines - still do not "talk" with each other, and the county was hoping to replace them with modern systems based on personal computers.

The original financing for the project came from $32.7 million in councilmanic bonds, which the council can issue without a vote of the people and then pay off from the general fund. The $3.7 million will come mostly from interest earned from banking the money from those bonds.

The county will have spent all of the $38 million budgeted for the project by the end of this month.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/html98/sims25m_20000725.html

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 25, 2000