If they don't contract to the lowest bidder, they certainly feel like they're contracting to a grifter who certainly subcontracts to them.

Between:

* The implementation delays https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jul/19/wsdot-reaches-...

* The payment issues https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sta...

* The customer support issues

* the sensor issues (admittedly those may be on the state and not ETC/ETAN, unclear)

and more the state abandoned its contract with ETC in favor of one with ETAN, which took the system offline for two weeks to switch over and admittedly hasn't been much better (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wsd...).

God forbid we let the state hire a few local SWEs (Seattle doesn't have any of those) to write and maintain a system instead of paying $30M every few years plus a cut of tolls to whatever Texas contractor gave the most perks to a WSDOT exec.

I don't know anything about that particular case, and I would have agreed with you about the "few local SWEs", until I saw this side of the business. You would be floored by the amount of work and hoops that you have to jump through, and that's well before the SLAs and KPIs. Take a wild guess how much it costs to hoist, populate, and maintain a gantry with the associated sensors, cameras, etc. That's in the price tag, too. The SWEs aren't doing that work! The SWEs definitely aren't driving the test vehicles at the test track.

There's a good reason that the systems themselves cost so much money. Heck, it costs an arm and a leg just for the routine maintenance permits! The CI/CD, security, data persistence, data provenance, latency, and agency interop requirements are absolutely insane. Trust me, it's more than just a few SWE can handle.

Lastly, it's definitely not about any under-the-table dealings. There's just a huge amount of work! When deciding to whom to award the contract, they do background checks on key company people, look at past contracts, etc.

That's the reality of the situation.