ST. LOUIS — St. Louis Lambert International Airport plans to spend up to $891,000 more on a new accounting system tied to delays in paying some vendors last year.
Airport Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge said Lambert always intended to hire a company to maintain the new system. She said most problems syncing up its new system with another new one at City Hall ended by the start of this year.
The city Airport Commission voted Wednesday to OK a three-year contract with Austin, Texas-based Pharos Solutions NA, Inc.
“It’s about ongoing maintenance and support as we look into the future,” she said of the contract, which still needs approval from the city’s top fiscal body — the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.
Antonio Strong, the airport’s deputy director for finance and administration, said Pharos also would be responsible for ongoing testing, installing any needed software upgrades, training users and other tasks through April 2027.
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Last November the Post-Dispatch reported on problems Lambert was having in catching up on a backlog of vendor invoices.
For a time last year, vendor invoices were delayed weeks to a month beyond the airport’s usual payment cycle of 30 to 45 days.
One company, the airport’s cleaning contractor, even gave notice to terminate its contract because of the delays. But in the end the city paid up and the company continued working.
Hamm-Niebruegge said last year that the slow payments to the cleaning contractor weren’t solely related to the new payment systems.
She said the bulk of the issue was that the company upgraded its own time clock system and that didn’t sync up with how the airport paid its invoices and tracked the contractor’s work hours.
Airport officials said the planned new contract with Pharos would be in addition to about $2 million spent previously to design, install and turn on the accounting and procurement system.
Strong, the deputy director, said Pharos was the only company that responded to a request for proposals for the maintenance and support work. He said Lambert approached 20 to 25 companies about submitting bids.
Chicago-based Unison Consulting Co., will do 25% of the work as a subcontractor. Hamm-Niebruegge said Unison also has a contract as Lambert’s financial consultant and worked with another company on implementing the accounting system.