City Utilities tries to waste $340,000 of your tax dollars
Posted by Mike Sylvester - 5/21/08 @ 7:00 pm - Filed Under City Council, Featured
As many of you know I am sick and tired of our local Government officials contracting everything they possibly can to out-of-town consultants.
According to the News Sentinel our City Council blocked a proposition from City Utilities to hire another out-of-town consultant to develop educational materials for schools, how to manuals for homeowners, and development standards for use in residential and commercial construction. These materials would be used to implement a program to promote a rain water initiative that is supposed to get 1000 homeowners to build rain gardens to help retain storm-water runoff. The consultant would also have designed 16 rain gardens and would have helped run community meetings to promote the rain gardens.
Why on Earth does our City Utilities group feel that we have to hire an International Consulting firm to handle a simple project like this?
I have several questions:
1. How was this project put out to bid. What were the bid specifications?
2. How many firms bid on this project?
3. How many local firms were contacted concerning this project.
I am very tempted to start a new Consulting Company and bid on projects like this. It is 100% ABSURD to hire a company that is not located in Fort Wayne to handle something simple like this.
I imagine I would hire about 5 people and perform this project in a more efficient and cost effective way and I further bet we could come up with a better project since the people I would hire live in Fort Wayne and understand Fort Wayne.
I have contacted the City Public Information Officer and I plan on learning exactly how this consulting contract was put out for bid; and more directly, IF it was put out for bid.
Mike Sylvester, a person who is tired of hiring out-of-town consultants for every small task.
P.S. I am extremely glad that City Council blocked this wasteful consulting contract in a time when the City is supposed to look for ways to cut costs…
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5 Responses to “City Utilities tries to waste $340,000 of your tax dollars”
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Mike:
Most importantly we would be spending $3,400 per homeowner when we are supposed to be looking at budget cuts.
Where’s the sense?
How to manuals for homeowners? To do what?
Educational material for schools? Why?
Development standards for use in residential and commercial construction? What?
Mike,
I’ll have video of this up shortly but in the meantime the city invited 5 companies to bid on the project. According to the city utilities spokeswoman they chose them because of their experience with a similar project in Kansas City. I don’t know if any of the 5 were local firms - I doubt it.
Just wait until you see the video - it didn’t go over well. But I want to point out that the city council did not save any money by rejecting the project. The city has to spend the money on a rain garden project as part of their combined sewage overflow penalty to the EPA. However, they can find a project that delivers a little more than this one would of…
[...] Mike Sylvester’s post touched on the rain garden project that was discussed at the last city council meeting. The impetus for this project comes from the city’s consent decree with the EPA and is part of the city’s fines related to the combined sewage overflow problem. During negotiations the EPA told the city they needed to develop some kind of green infrastructure project and city utilities decided on a rain garden project. [...]
See the rest of my comment on Jeff’s followup post but I wanted to say thank you.