I know I have brought this up several times over the years, in fact, I believe in Councilor Staggers 2nd term (he is in his 3rd now) there was some numbers presented to the city of what they were spending on consultants, and it was staggering (excuse the pun).
You have to realize that the departments that use consultants, outside counsel and professional advice are the engineering, the legal and finance department.
According to the January 2015 salary report (DOC: 2015-Wages-January) Read this a few times and your stomach will churn) there are these many people on the payroll in each department;
Engineering; 73
Finance; 29
City Attorney’s office; 13
You would think that with this many ‘professionals’ working for the city in each of these departments they wouldn’t need ‘consultants’ to tell them what to do?
So why is that?
Well the obvious, they need an outside consultant to give them the answers they want, and if they get their tits in a wringer, with a decision they make, they can always blame the consultant.
But get this. If a consultant sends a plan to the city, let’s say an architect’s plan, and a city engineer signs off on it, if something goes wrong due to the plans, the city engineer is liable due to their sign off. Which of course doesn’t mean a hill of beans for the consultant or the engineer, but costs the taxpayer in the end (EX: Events Center siding fiasco).
Let’s look at some examples. On Tuesday the city council watched a presentation on the parks. The consultant charged around $59K. In his presentation he pretty much said the city was doing everything right, which is fantastic. So councilor Staggers asked, “So if we are doing everything correctly, why should we pay you to tell us that?”
Another example is the water rate increases, which the city was WAAAAYYY off on. Why is it that our water department can’t get with the finance department and figure out how much money needs to be raised for the enterprise funds to maintain water and sewer? This is simple accounting, projecting and algebra, but we had to hire a consultant (who was wrong) to justify the increase.
Lastly, it’s story time on DaCola, and Ol’ Man Detroit is going to tell you a story about a hole in the wall. Recently a former city employee told me about how their department needed a hole in the wall at one of their department branches and it had to be done to a load bearing wall. When they approached the engineering department about plans, they referred them to an outside architect who came in and essentially chuckled and said, “This is a hole that needs to be made, you need to contact an engineer.”
So I ask again. Do we need all of these consultants? Or better yet, do we need all of these ‘do nothing’ city employees?
How do I get on the consultant list? If you state what they want and they’re responsible for the outcome, I need some of this action. I’d do it for a tenth the price and they could cite how much they’ve saved the city. I’d even pay out all but a thousand to everyone on the kickbacks list.
I think there should be a separate city attorney office that represents citizens. This one could be renamed the mayor’s attorneys office. The new office wouldn’t need consultants. One competent attorney wouldn’t need a creative writer’s staff with other people to shred documents and destroy evidence. Rule of law doesn’t require constant misinterpretation and an incinerator. One real public attorney could handle it.