The consultant line item is up 61% in five years. Council wants to know what it bought.
A routine audit-committee question turned into a full inventory of external studies — including several that duplicate work the city already owned.
It started as a single question at audit committee — how much does the city spend on external consultants? — and the answer arrived this week as a 40-page inventory: spending on outside studies, reviews and advisory work has grown 61 per cent over five years, well ahead of both inflation and the growth of the city's own staff complement.
Some of the growth is defensible and the report says so: provincially mandated studies, specialized engineering the city can't keep in-house, peak-load work on the development pipeline. The committee's attention went to the other category — strategy refreshes, service reviews and feasibility studies that, in at least six cases the auditors flagged, substantially duplicated studies the city had commissioned within the previous decade and, in two cases, never implemented.
The pattern the auditors describe is procedural: commissioning a study has become the default way to defer a decision, and the shelf where studies go afterward has no owner. Their sharpest recommendation is also the cheapest — a public registry of every commissioned study, its cost, and what was done with it.
Council votes on the registry next month. The Bulletin supports it for professional reasons: we have been assembling roughly that inventory by freedom-of-information request, and the city doing it voluntarily would be both better government and considerably less postage.
