BY DANIEL SCHRAGER
Daily Post Staff Writer
Palo Alto’s City Council will examine its use of outside consultants, which cost the city $27 million last year.
City Manager Ed Shikada will ask the council on Wednesday (Oct. 22) to consider how to rein in the city’s rampant use of consultants.
Last year, council brought in consultants to assist with planning, design, engineering, permitting and program-ming, as well as conducting studies to present in front to council. Shikada’s report to council on the topic said consultants can offer valuable expertise on technical issues.
“Consultants bring valuable technical and professional expertise, while city staff offer familiarity with local context, including community expectations, data resources, and internal procedures,” Shikada’s report said.
The council hired consultants for a total of 44 projects last year. That included spending $4 million on a group of consultants to help with inspections and plan reviews.
“I’m sure everybody is kind of in agreement: We probably over-utilize consultants a bit,” Councilman Greer Stone said at a May meeting. The city spent $2.7 million hiring consultants for water quality control plant planning and $2.4 million for the design of a downtown parking garage.
But consultants can save the city money by reducing the number of full-time employees the city needs to put on its payroll.
“In some cases, the city outsources as a first step before adding permanent staff due to concerns around long-term financial commitments and the need to sustain consistent workloads,” Shikada said.
Consultants also let the city offer a wider range of services than it could otherwise, according to Shikada.
Where are they needed?
The goal of Wednesday’s conversation is to streamline the processes the city uses when hiring consultants, rather than to eliminate the use of consultants altogether.
Shikada said council will look to identify where consultants are and aren’t needed, clarify consultants’ roles and develop a guide of “best practices” for the city to use when bringing in outside help.
“Refining how we use them is great, because they’re not going anywhere,” Stone said.
Council won’t vote on the topic on Wednesday but will make a recommendation to Shikada on next steps.
Refining how you manage the consultant is also the issue. Have you checked out TODAY’S CPAU survey conducted by Blue Search Research, a Connecticut-based consultancy, on how satisfied we are with CPAU water??
If you do, you’ll see that when one follows the link inviting our participation to START the survey takes you directly to a THANK YOU page for having completed the survey and totally bypasses the survey itself. Do not pass go, but collect your consulting fee and propose the next step in research to “improve our utilities.”:
Who’s managing this project and how much is it costing us?