Relying on consultants backfiring for city hall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/11/2017 (2904 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeggers got an alarming reminder this past week of the pitfalls of relying on the advice of private consultants to help drive the public business of government. This time, the trouble surrounded plans to increase road capacity in south Charleswood.

The city has been working for years with area residents and a consultant to find a way of improving traffic flow through an area of the city that still retains much of its original rural charm.

Residents of the area were shown three options with a varying degree of cost and disruption. The people who live in the area chose the least costly and disruptive option — a twinning of Wilkes Avenue.

A few months later, those same residents met again with civic officials, and the private engineering firm that was advising them, to find out that a fourth option had been devised, which was not only more costly, but was profoundly more impactful to the area. This option, which involved a re-routing and extension of the Sterling Lyon Parkway, would result in tens of millions of dollars in additional cost and the expropriation of 95 private properties.

Residents were told this newly revealed option was more or less a done deal, even though it had not been presented to, or approved by, city council. Property owners were told to start amassing materials to negotiate a sale to the city or face expropriation.

The residents went ballistic.

Outraged citizens banded together and, thanks to some well-timed exposure in the traditional media, persuaded city council that the bureaucrats and the consultant had acted inappropriately by devising a new more disruptive option and then representing it as the only option going forward.

Two things are abundantly clear:

First, it seems that three years is not long enough to eradicate the culture of corner-cutting and process abusing that was cultivated during the Sam Katz era at city hall. There is no easy way to explain why bureaucrats, aided by a consultant, would strike out on their own to push such a controversial plan without approval from the political level. Clearly, the city has to do more work to get the bureaucracy to work within existing protocols.

Second, the cost of using external consultants is not always measured in dollars and cents. The rise in the use of consultants by governments at all levels has coincided with deliberate efforts to squeeze the middle and senior levels of management in the public service. With each swath cut from this population of public administrator comes a corresponding rise in the number of contracts awarded to outside subject matter experts.

Politicians will argue that it is more cost-effective to hire an expert on a time-limited contract than it is to employ them full time and pay salary and benefits. On a straight dollar-for-dollar basis, that might seem like a real bargain. But as we have seen with the south Charleswood debacle — and in scores of other examples — cheap does not always equate with good.

Consultants are, in and of themselves, a strange breed. There are times when a government needs very specialized advice on an issue or project and is forced to go outside the ranks of its own officials to get good information. Other times, however, outside consultants are simply creating a poor, cut-rate version of what professional public servants would create.

Consultants are often technical people, and offer their clients solutions that are often the shortest path between idea and execution. Missing from that methodology is a deep understanding of the culture of the people and places that are affected, or the politics surrounding certain decisions.

The province is suffering through a version of this with the KPMG audits of government operations and health care. KPMG resisted the public release of the audits, realizing that many of its recommendations would be seen as controversial and even mean-spirited.

KPMG has recommended a number of politically dicey options to help Premier Brian Pallister balance his budget, including an income test for the property tax credit, a freeze on operating grants for colleges and universities that will hike tuition fees, a gutting of government communications staff and advertising, and major reductions in support to school boards and specialized health-care services.

What is notable about most of these examples is that, while they would make a significant dent in expenditures, they do not always translate into improved services. In the KPMG health-care audit in particular, the recommendations hold down spending largely by eliminating programs that help people recover from illness or surgery faster, and remain healthier in the long term.

The Pallister government may do none of these things. Or, they may do some or even most of them. Regardless of how many KPMG suggestions the government acts on, they have to bear the political burden for having asked for, and then received, all of them.

Consultants are not asked to calculate political blow back, or make a prediction about a government’s chance of re-election should they act on the recommendations in a study. Consultants are there to provide options, and then let the elected officials make the final decision.

In the case of the south Charleswood roadwork, it seems that the consultants’ recommendations somehow acquired the weight of a fully approved plan that was properly vetted through council. So far, no one on the administrative side of the equation has offered a satisfactory explanation.

CAO Doug McNeil apologized to residents, and admitted that what had transpired represented a “serious misstep in this process.”

This is eerily familiar to the stink that has accompanied other work by consultants and other decisions made at city hall that have flown in the face of due process and public consultation.

Mayor Brian Bowman continues to say that his job is to end the era of unaccountability at city hall. Steps have been taken to ensure that due process is followed, and that the process is as transparent as possible.

What nearly happened in south Charleswood is a reminder that relying too heavily on consultants is not a boost to accountability. And that it takes more than a campaign slogan to change a culture of corruption and expediency.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca