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SimHouston Still Alive

A special City Council meeting to examine the SimHouston contract didn't happen, but the actions of the company behind SimHouston is raising eyebrows.

HOUSTON -- The controversial SimHouston project appears to be safe, at least for the time being.

Council Member Bruce Tatro had called for a special meeting of the City Council on Tuesday to discuss canceling the SimHouston contract. Due to a lack of a quorum, however, the meeting never materialized.

The city signed a deal with Internet Access Technologies to roll out SimHouston -- a project to make a suite of Web-enabled, office-type applications available to Houston's citizens at public libraries via the Internet.

Beginning Monday night, the following message -- contained in a pop-up window -- began appearing when subscribers attempted to access their SimHouston accounts:
"Warning - System Outage
A few city council members want to remove SimHouston from you. They are meeting on Tuesday, October 15 at 1:00 p.m. at City Hall. SimHouston may not be available after that time."

Richard Lewis, Houston's CIO, confirmed the message's existence.

"I met with Ray Davis, of IAT, the next day, Tuesday, to express my concern about the activities that they had conducted since Council Member Tatro secured enough signatures to call a special meeting to, effectively, reconsider that contract," Lewis said. "I made it clear to Mr. Davis that they needed to inform me of their proposed publicity, consistent with the provision of the contract. That provision requires my written approval before IAT does any publicity. I showed Mr. Davis a hard copy of the warning, and he assured me that it had been removed from the application."

Despite IAT's tactics in posting the message, Lewis said, the lack of a quorum for the meeting called by Council Member Tatro seems to indicate that the City Council, as a whole, appears willing to let the SimHouston project proceed.

Council Member Tatro said he can call such a meeting again, and he might in the future.

"It's like the story that was never told; it was a meeting that was never held," Tatro said. "Could another meeting be held? Absolutely. Will we possibly use that as an option? Absolutely. Because the administration, with all of the allegations of possible bid rigging and all the information that's out there, has simply said that it sees no reason to postpone, halt or suspend the contract for any period of time."

Tatro said other council members, even those who initially supported SimHouston, are beginning to question the wisdom of going through with the deployment of the contract.

"It would clearly be better, for all concerned, to suspend the contract and just wait to see what happens," Tatro said.

He is also not pleased with IAT's posting of the warning message.

"On the software that we utilize at the libraries -- which is, for all intents and purposes, our software -- IAT embedded a window with that statement that popped up before you entered any of those applications," he said. "As a layman, I would say they are hacking into our software. They also put that same message on the SimHouston.com Web site. Now, we have to check into the literal, legal ownership of that Web site, but, as a layman, to me, that's the city's Web site. That's what we're paying for.

"Here we have the vendor putting their political messages in our software and on our Web site," he said. "We believe that that's not only a breach of contract; we've got a huge security issue with this company."

Tatro said the city's Office of Inspector General is also investigating the posting of the message.

IAT said the message was a public service and that is has been removed.

"We just wanted to let SimHouston users know that, depending on the outcome of the meeting, SimHouston, the software applications and any documents or anything else the users may have stored [on SimHouston] may not be available after that time," said Suluh Lukoskie, IAT's director of corporate communications.

"We thought it would be fair, and in the best interests of citizens, [for them] to know it wasn't that, just randomly, the software might not be available; it was, in fact, because of a special City Council meeting," she said.

The idea that the company attacked the city's IT system to post the message is incorrect, she said.

"Well, we host this system," she said. "We've created the SimHouston program, and we provide that program [to Houston]. I don't know if it's even appropriate to say that we're hacking in. We'd be hacking into our own system."

More than 60,000 Houston residents have already been using thin-client devices at libraries to create, store and access documents they created with the SimHouston applications. The documents are stored on the company's servers.

The contract with IAT has generated significant political controversy in Houston since it was approved by a one-vote margin in June. Part of the controversy includes allegations of irregularities in the bidding process for the contract.

Some members of the City Council have also questioned cost-savings estimates from the city's former CIO, Denny Piper, which he said the city would realize when staff from city departments are migrated to IAT's SimDesk platform.