The city spent $875,000 to hire consultants for a variety of projects and services last year, a recent annual report shows.
The report is the first of its kind and stems from a motion passed by council last September directing administration to produce an annual itemized list of which consultants were hired for which projects, and for how much.
At the time, Coun. Shelley Biermanski argued annual reports on consultant spending might cause city staff to second-guess whether or not consultants are necessary on a case-by-case basis.
More than 25 per cent of the $875,000 spent on consultants last year is represented by a single contract, the report shows. Eleven Eleven Consulting Inc. received almost $240,000 for its work on the Municipal Naming Project and for producing the main draft of the city's new naming policy, which council formally approved just this week.
Eleven Eleven Consulting's contract was the sole contract worth more than $100,000, according to the report, as the second-highest total was nearly $86,000 for EPB, a United States-based company formerly known as Economic Development Research Group.
The almost $86,000 paid to EPB was for the group's work on developing a “financial methodology and tool for (the Collaborative Economic Development project),” the report states.
On the other end of the spending spectrum, the report shows the city contracted consultants for amounts less than $1,000 in four instances, including just $90 for legal services from Shores Jardine LLP for services related to the Sturgeon County Annexation in January, 2022.
Other contracts worth less than $1,000 included $687 to Trace Associates for monitoring city-owned contaminated sites; $656 to BSI Group Canada for renewing St. Albert Transit's Environment Management Standard licence; and $948 to Bureau Veritas Canada for lab analysis of samples taken from city-owned contaminated sites.
In an email, city spokesperson Cory Sinclair confirmed that the $875,000 spent last year represents a roughly $102,000 decrease compared to 2021.
Biermanski said thinks it's important residents are able to see what the city spends on consultants.
“I do believe that (some $800,000) again is pretty substantial, so I believe it's valuable that we need to be looking at that every year, and perhaps working on bringing some of those unnecessary costs down or viewing what could possibly be unnecessary,” she said.
“I think it's great for the public to be able to read all the money that's spent on consultants.”
Coun. Ken MacKay said he had no concerns about consultant spending because the costs reflect expertise and technology that city administration doesn't have in-house.
“I think the cost that the contractors are there for or the services that they provide are ones that we just don't have — we just don't have the skill set or the competency — so these contractors just supplement our business processes, whether it's in our (human resources) or in our planning or in some of our training,” he said.
“The big one, of course, was the Municipal Naming Project and that was approved through council, it wasn't an administrative one, so all the other ones I think are pretty in line with what I would expect we would use consultants for,” MacKay said.
The annual report can be found on the city website at council's June 20 meeting agenda.
