It’s good to see that city council is finally getting down to addressing efficiency at city hall, but there are questions about the true commitment among councillors and city administration to scrutinizing city spending.
Two weeks ago council passed a motion to pursue a program of “continuous improvement” at city hall. This really means rotating efficiency reviews of city departments and programs. There will also be an effort to break down city activities into quantifiable outputs that can be compared over time. On Monday council passed a motion to review the policy in a year to assess its effectiveness.
For an issue that was top of mind during the civic election nearly a year ago, this has spent a long time simmering on the back burner. And the talk you hear now isn’t nearly as strong as it was a year ago when, at an election forum on Sept. 28, Mayor Nolan Crouse pledged a sweeping review of city operations.
“What I’m calling for if I’m elected is what I would call a complete efficiency review of city hall with all the departments,” Crouse declared at the time. “We have to peel off all the layers and get right down to it.”
What council is actually pursuing, with a plan achieved after months of behind-the-scenes work by Crouse and councillors Cam MacKay and Malcolm Parker, is more of a periodic probing.
This type of scrutiny is long overdue. The city is an extremely complex organization that spends nearly $140 million on operations each year. For such an organization to operate without performing intense self-evaluation is sheer folly.
At budget time there are always questions about how and why the city spends as it does. The answers often boil down to, ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ leaving council to either make arbitrary cuts or take administration’s word that the spending is necessary and wise.
Now there will be an effort to quantify the city’s operations, so its performance can be measured over time. This is a good move.
There are trouble spots in this plan, however, which isn’t really a plan but a statement that something is somehow going to be done. There is no detail how this scrutiny will be carried out or how much it will cost the city. Curiously, these were the very reasons cited last November by councillors when they voted 6-1 against a MacKay motion to introduce efficiency audits.
Much of the implementation of the policy will be left in the hands of administration, the very body that repeatedly tells council that the city’s spending is already being done wisely. This should be a red flag, particularly because administration has been slow to warm up to the idea of these efficiency reviews.
Crouse said last spring that city administration wasn’t buying into any scheme that had the words “efficiency review” attached to it because that had a negative connotation. Hence the shift to the weaselly-sounding “continuous improvement.”
All this raises doubts about the level of commitment to improvement among council and city administration. In fact, it raises questions about who is truly in charge down at city hall. It would be nice if council could establish itself as the horse and not the cart.
