Board Approves Revised Contract With Pacific Bell
The Board of Supervisors Tuesday approved a $250-million, five-year contract with Pacific Bell for the telecommunications giant to provide local service to county phones and link county computers into a centralized network.
County officials told supervisors they had significantly toughened the county’s contract with PacBell since October, when a Times report revealed that the state blamed PacBell for a spree of devastating computer crashes.
Those provisions require PacBell to promptly disclose problems with its systems, hike its liability and allow the county to terminate the contract faster in the event of breakdowns, said David Michaelson, the county lawyer who worked on the deal.
Supervisors praised the deal but warned PacBell and their own staff that they did not want to hear of problems first in newspapers.
“There is nothing that will incur my wrath more than finding out about [trouble] through the back door . . . or from a newspaper article,” Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky said.
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