Twittering aside, under Gavin Newsom SF’s tech is in the toilet

Gavin Newsom likes to present himself as a cutting-edge kind of guy, particularly when it comes to high-tech gadgetry and whatever social media fad is the flavor of the month. He even delivered his last State of the City address exclusively via YouTube, and he routinely jets around with the Google guys on their private jet.

Gavin Newsom checks out the latest in digitial camera technology at a recent mayoral event.

Unfortunately, like pretty much everything Gavin Newsom does, his high-tech posturing is all puffery, devoid of any meaningful substance, nothing more than a show for anybody who might be watching him. The fact is, technologically speaking, the city is stuck in the 20th century and spending big dollars to stay there.

The irony of this situation is something SF Examiner columnist Ken Garcia touched on his column of April 28, when he pointed out that, among other things, the city’s district attorney’s only recently got email, and police officers routinely have trouble accessing case files.

In today’s Examiner, one of Garcia’s colleagues, Joshua Sabatini, filed a story that puts some numbers to the city’s ongoing technology deficit.

It turns out that, with the city facing a budget deficit well in excess of $400 million, the Newsom administration continues to spend nearly $200 million a year maintaining the city’s decrepit technology. Indeed, the city’s main system for payroll and other administrative tasks is considered so unreliable, Sabatini reports, that many departments have put together patchwork workarounds, spending huge amounts of money to provide a basic technological infrastructure that works — something Newsom’s been unable to do despite being well into his second term as mayor.

The president of the city’s Board of Supervisors, David Chiu, who apparently has a background in IT, is quoted in Sabatini’s story saying he believes the system is screwed up because of a lack of attention.

So, while Gavin may be wired, the city certainly isn’t, and the people of San Francisco are quite literally paying the price. Yet, Gavin Newsom continues to try and position himself, in his quest to become California’s next Governor, as “The Future.”

If the future is narcissistic self-absorbtion to the point where real-world responsibilities are utterly abdicated, then Gavin’s definitely it.

If it’s somethinge else, say, responsible leadership and policymakers who believe that public policy should be something more than a photo opportunity or a catch phrase, well, perhaps California needs to look somewhere else.