The Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) is staring at some sunk costs. According to an article today the PWSA spent $2.7 million on a financial management system that is essentially a closed loop and cannot communicate with the integrated City-County financial management system that took quite a long time to implement. A former City employee was quoted as saying that the PWSA should have jumped in on the integrated platform and one board member is not happy with the system they have.
But is that characterization of getting in on the City-County platform accurate? A March 2011 article seems to indicate that it was the City that was proposing to go with the PWSA’s platform as an alternative to joining the County’s system (the Act 47 rejected this option). That means the City-County integration was not even done at that point-that was not formally announced until January 2012, possibly two years after PWSA purchased its financial management system.
And how about the board member’s position-that "PWSA upper management recommended the system, and it made sense to approve it"? The PSWA board includes four Mayoral appointees: surely they had to have known in 2010 that there was a push to get a large integrated system. It was mentioned in the amended Act 47 plan that was written in 2009, a year before the PWSA purchase was made. Add on top of that the fact that the Mayor was bullish on cooperation and completed a purchase of the Borough of Millvale’s water system under the admirable goal of efficiency. Didn’t those appointees get direction from somewhere other than PWSA management? The other three members of the board are heavily involved in City finances-the Controller, the Finance Director, and the Treasurer. Did they offer opinions on where to steer the Authority’s financial platform?