Almost all of the city's poor efforts to provide services can be traced to by the Department of Finance Procurement Division and the Bureau of Accounting and Payroll Services. We can't buy things and we can't pay our bills. The city is broken. No vendors want to work with the city agencies. The city can't function because it doesn't have supplies, services, or real time procurement.

We could solve it be throwing bodies at the problem: Mass hire hundreds of people for a six month contract until the backlog is at zero on both sides of the problem. Then figure out how many people are needed to meet equilibrium.

Also, it is difficult to restore the full faith and credit of the city. There are only a few suppliers of certain city services where specifications were already established. For example: if the city establishes specifications that they only use a specific type of light pole from a single vendor, then that nationwide vendor only has one local distributor, then Baltimore City owes that one vendor $300,000 in unpaid bills, then Baltimore City can't order light poles until it pays it's outstanding bill. Also the two departments mentioned don't talk to each other. Additionally, Baltimore City will burn the vendors that are on a blanket contract and they city will have no supplier for that service. Vendors are often owed over $1,000,000+ and then refuse to accept any additional work in the city.

Traffic sign poles are sort of universal, but we could have cause some stupid error by not sourcing properly.

Also Baltimore City has minority business and women owned business requirements for most contracts over $300,000. So if Baltimore City has a contract to supply $500,000 of sign poles, the MBE/WBE office wants you to have 15% of that contract go to a subcontractor that is a MBE and 11% that is a WBE, so roughly 26% of your contract. All you do is supply sign poles, now you have to find another company to somehow take 26% of that contract and often if makes no sense. They want you to add a waiver or add garbage hauling to that contract by a MBE/WBE. There's roughly one person in the WBE/MBE office and they'll kick good vendors for not meeting the MBE/WBE requirement of their contract.

The city is broken. A mayor or city administrator that could get it to pay it's bills and buy things quickly would be the best thing since Willy Don Schaffer.