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April 02, 2008
CONSULTANTITIS--Suffered by the City Council
CONSULTANTITIS—Suffered by the City Council
One of the costly annual expenditures of the City is the hiring of CONSULTANTS for studies that rarely, if ever, result in any improvements to the City’s Structural Budget Deficit problem. In the last several years the City has hired, expensive, Consultants for the Neighborhood Plans, Downtown Access Plan, Opinion Surveys and now the General Plan Revision; which approaches a cost of approximately 2 million dollars (recognizing that much of this cost can be spread to funds other than the General Fund). There are other Consulting Services that are not listed here.
Each of these projects requires the City to allocate a substantial number of Staff to oversee the projects and to provide much of the information necessary for inclusion in the plans.These projects should have been handled by the existing City Staff, with little, if any Consultant expenditures. The existing well paid Staff should have the capabilities of conducting these studies, or perhaps the City’s hiring practices need improvement.
It is very obvious the City Council does not seem to understand the seriousness of the City’s Structural Budget Deficit. There are so many examples of the reason for the Deficit that has been obvious for at least the past 5 year; employee wages with annual increases that consume approximate 80% of the General Fund Expenditures; a lack of recognition of the fact that General Fund Revenues have been outpaced by its Expenditures for several years; and unwillingness to rein-in other expenditures, such as Consultant Services.
Posted by Fred at April 2, 2008 08:34 PM
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