For almost two years, Saratoga Springs Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi has wasted thousands of city dollars by failing to implement the software the city has purchased that would meet the New York State Attorney General’s key demand that the city properly archive text messages on the phones of city employees and officials.
This blog has covered Sanghvi’s mismanagement of the city’s IT Department extensively. In May of 2024, this blog published a post about Sanghvi’s chronic failure to implement much needed archiving software. Now, a year later, this problem just continues to drag on.
Mayor Ron Kim announced with great fanfare the purchase of software called SMARSH back in 2023. This software would capture all texts from city cell phones and save them in a manner that would make the archive of texts easily searchable. At the time the goal was to help address the city’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests backlog. The SMARSH software took on additional importance when in February, 2024, Attorney General Letitia James included in her report the recommendation that the city maintain records of city officials’ communications.
It has now been over a year and a half, and Commissioner Sanghvi, who oversees the city’s IT department, has been unable to implement the SMARSH software. That means the city spent $12,942.21 during a year when the software went unused.
At one point Sanghvi informed the Council that deployment of SMARSH was delayed because she was developing procedures and standards for archiving. The question is why would you purchase the software before establishing the standards necessary for its operation especially if that is going to take over a year and a half during which time the software goes unused.
In any case here, here is Sanghvi in February of 2024 (five months after the city purchased the software), strangely claiming falsely that the city is using the software.
It is unclear if the city renewed the contract with SMARSH when the contract was up last October as there are no public records that I could find regarding a renewal of this software.
If the contract was renewed in October of 2024, the city would have now spent over $20,000.00 so far with still nothing to show for that money.
It is quite extraordinary that Commissioner Sanghvi would allow something that, by her own statements urgently needs to be implemented, sit idle.
You would think Sanghvi would be embarrassed about this failure, but she seems oblivious.
Saratoga Springs Politics 