In order to run, cities need people and stuff. 

Things don’t work without trucks and toilet paper and computers and train cars. Cities also need contractors who can fix things and run programs that government workers aren’t equipped to handle on their own. 

Nearly one-third of San Francisco’s $16 billion annual budget is allocated to procuring these goods and services. Yet the seemingly mundane act of distributing those funds has become a gigantic Gordian knot.

As the urban think tank SPUR has documented for years, San Francisco’s contracting system has become overly complex, politicized and inefficient. Our municipal codes include the words “contract” and “procurement” more than 8,700 times. Seemingly straightforward tasks like buying software or hiring a contractor can require months of negotiations, approvals, waivers and trips between departments — far more complex than the way it works in the private sector. According to the City Administrator’s Office, the length of time to process a single contract can range from 8½ months to more than 1½ years. And fulfilling a single procurement process costs roughly $25,000 — even if the contract itself is only worth $25,000.

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Some procurement regulations exist for good reasons — public money should not be spent casually, and city contracts should be competitive and transparent to stem corruption. But at some point, safeguards accumulate into something else: a system so cumbersome that the process itself starts wasting precious city funds and undermining the public interest.

San Francisco contracts are governed by rules scattered across more than 100 sections of city code. Different departments maintain at least five separate Microsoft contracts, 20 training systems, multiple email systems, servers and firewalls, and........

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