Spending on City's New Payroll System Tops $32 Million; Saka Spouts Off About Tech Workers, COVID School Closures

"Many of those workers aren't from the city of Seattle. Many of them don't look like me, to be more blunt. And you know, there's a lot of reliance on H1B visas."

1. The city of Seattle has increased its spending on its troubled new payroll software system, Workday, from $14 million to more than $32 million.

The cost increases have been catalogued in a series of 18 change orders to the city's contract with Deloitte, the consulting firm that's been implementing and troubleshooting the new system since last year. Each change order includes a catalog of outstanding issues with Workday, which launched last year after numerous delays.

As soon as the new system was in place, city employees began reporting missing or inaccurate pay, deferred compensation that came out of their paychecks but never showed up in their bank accounts, and disappearing vacation days, among many other problems that have ranged from annoying (managers not being able to hand off payroll approval duties when they take time off) to nerve-wracking (paychecks that showed up hundreds or thousands of dollars short) to harmless but potentially costly (some workers got vacation time they didn't qualify for—and took it.)

A spokesman for the city's HR department, Antorris Williams, said change orders are common for large projects, and that all the changes "were approved by the Mayor's Office and did not require" approval from the city council through a formal budget action. Last year's city budget estimated that implementing Workday would cost up to $50 million over the life of the contract, which is ongoing.

PubliCola has reached out to the city numerous times about issues with Workday. Every time, we've been told that whatever specific crisis we were calling about had been resolved or would be fixed soon. We don't envy the city HR employees who have to put out fires caused by complex new software that may not have been ready for prime time. But the kind of problems Deloitte was reporting as recently as late February—when the most recent $2.1 million change order was signed—suggest that worrying problems persist.

The tables in Deloitte's most recent contract update, for example, show dozens of issues that have arisen recently or remain unaddressed. These include employees getting shorted on vacation time; people being improperly told they're ineligible for family leave; incorrect deductions for union dues and social security; and all manner of big and small nuisances that appear to require one-off changes to the complex system.

Last year, the city converted five "emergency" positions that were created to implement Workday from temporary to permanent. The new positions added $1.5 million in annual city spending. According to the most recent city budget, the permanent employees will provide " ongoing operations and maintenance support post-implementation."

2. During a meeting of the city's Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy committee on Thursday, Councilmember Rob Saka, a former Big Tech attorney, was talking about the need to for more opportunities for local Black and brown kids when he made this comment about Seattle's tech industry:

"Many of those workers aren't from the city of Seattle. Many of them don't look like me, to be more blunt. ... And you know, there's a lot of reliance on H1B visas and everything. We need to empower more people with the opportunity to have these jobs, more people locally. So that's why we need more people from the Central District, more people from the South End, more people from High Point, and we do that by investing in digital skilling initiatives." Saka's comment, which suggested that Asian immigrants are taking jobs that should go to people from Seattle, was an extraordinarily poor choice of words, at best, in the current anti-immigrant national climate.

Earlier in the meeting, Saka criticized Seattle for keeping schools and preschools closed during COVID for longer than other parts of the state. After opining that kids who don't attend preschool are too often watched or babysit at home by Mom or Grandma—nd half the time being babysit by a TV, the soap operas," Saka said his own kids' preschool "stayed open the whole time," allowing him and his wife to "work remotely without [the] distraction of two year olds and three year olds primarily having meltdowns everywhere."

Seattle, Saka continued, had erred by keeping schools closed too long, and had to be forced by then-Gov. Jay Inslee to reopen at least part-time in April 2021. In 2021, when "schools across the state were opening up left and right, it took an order of the the governor the state of Washington to order schools to open up in Seattle," Saka said. "So COVID, apparently, was worse in the city of Seattle than other parts of the state, other parts of the country. Not true, by the way. And what kind of impact does it have on people's mental health? Not good!"

The committee's other members did not remark on Saka's comments about immigration and school closures during COVID.