Dianah Neff will leave her Philadelphia job overseeing Wireless Philadelphia, and return to a private-sector job in early fall, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer and Om Malik.
News of her pending departure began circulating inside City Hall on Friday. An official announcement could come this week.
Neff’s deputy, Terry Phillis, is being courted as her replacement by top officials, including city Managing Director Pedro Ramos, who lunched with Phillis on Friday.
Officially titled the city’s chief information officer, Neff, 57, is the driver of a trailblazing plan to turn the city into the nation’s largest municipal wireless hot spot. Wireless Philadelphia is one of the biggest legacy projects for Street, who has 18 months left in office.
But now Neff will be gone before the project is complete.
The city awarded a contract to the Atlanta-based EarthLink company a few months ago, but Wireless Philadelphia - which entails putting thousands of transmitters on light poles - isn’t expected to be up and running until sometime next year.
Neff, who spent 14 years working for high-tech firms in California’s Silicon Valley, was specially recruited at the start of Street’s first mayoral term from a job she then held with the City of San Diego.
Mayor Street - a known technology junkie - appointed her to his cabinet, and made her the highest-paid member of his administration, with a salary that is now $193,800 a year.
Mayor Street defends tech czar Dianah Neff being his highest paid cabinet member and getting flown to 56 conferences since 2001, according to City Paper. “Well,” says Street, “we tried to cut costs by sending her in a truck. But then she told us the Internets are not a big truck. It’s tubes!”
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