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COLUMN: Million-dollar efficiency review not a good bang for city's buck

"It literally breaks my heart to think about how many malnourished children, abused women, unemployed men, ill citizens, lonely seniors and isolated minorities could have been helped by some of this money"
McLeod Brian-mug
Columnist Brian McLeod

While it was announced some time ago, city council’s decision to spend $1 million on a consulting study on efficiency so angered me that it’s taken this long for my blood pressure to drop down to safe levels. The city hired a major accounting firm to develop this study. I’m sure you are familiar with these kinds of reports – multiple glossy pages of breathtaking colours, charts, tables and graphs. They are wonderfully eye-catching when they first come out, but soon end up on the floor holding doors open.  

It strikes me that the first group of people I would ask about efficiency would be the city’s own employees. After all, they likely see daily examples of processes and procedures burdened down and highly inefficient. Instead of spending $1 million to hire accountants to ask the city’s own people, why doesn’t the city just ask all these staff members? We have a lot of great people working for the city – I’m sure they have hundreds of suggestions, all based on “real world” examples and experiences. And, if the city worries about collecting and analyzing all this data, there are dozens of qualified citizens living in our city who would be delighted to do this work. Yes, we would pay them – but $50,000 is probably more than enough, and a long cry from $1 million!

Secondly, why not ask our own citizens? Citizens interact with the city on a daily basis, and likely have countless examples and suggestions on how to improve efficiency in city operations. And all of this information is available free of charge – our residents will not be asking for payment, they would likely be delighted that someone cared enough to simply ask them for an opinion.  

City council has made a lot of noise about how COVID-19 is hurting their finances, and I originally believed them. However, when they throw $1 million out the window on a study that could have cost five per cent of this total, whining about lower revenues no longer persuades me. As we all know, a lot of people have suffered from this pandemic (and are still suffering). Imagine how much help could have been provided from this same million dollars? What a staggering waste of the taxpayers' money. City council wasting your money – money that you could have put to much better use than the city did.

Here’s a true story that illuminates the issue. Years ago, a museum in NYC had appointed a new member to their board of directors, and at this appointee’s first meeting, the board was getting ready to approve a $200,000 study to determine which of their exhibits gathered the most attention from visitors. Before the vote could be held, the new member addressed the board: “Rather than spend all this money, why not just ask our janitors which floors around our exhibits always need the most cleaning? Once they give you the list, you’ll know which exhibits attract the most traffic-and it won’t cost you a nickel to find out.”   

In case you were wondering, the above is an example of something we call “common sense”. Apparently, at City Hall, common sense is as rare as snowballs in July. It literally breaks my heart to think about how many malnourished children, abused women, unemployed men, ill citizens, lonely seniors and isolated minorities could have been helped by some of this money – your money that was absolutely wasted.

Brian McLeod is a St. Albert resident.

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