As a serious observer of the past two city councils I always had the suspicion that previous council's and administration's were willing to fund a never-ending stream of reports and studies. After the expenditure of considerable tax dollars it appeared once being received by Council, those expensive reports and studies were just added to the growing pile to gather dust with many others which had gone before.
The idea of actually using those reports to formulate and inform a forward moving action plan seemed almost a foreign concept. It was almost as if when the study had been complete, the work was also complete, and then on to the next study. Very lucrative proposition for engineers and consultants of all stripes.
A recent example was a $50,000 consulting bill apparently approved by the Mayor which now seems to have disappeared when the consultant was asked to produce documentation to support their invoice.
We (that is you and I fellow taxpayer) also coughed up about a million bucks to engineer that ditch in Colliery Dams Park.
If memory serves we spent $25,000 to some outfit to help reorganize the city website, we also spent a considerable amount for someone to do graphics for the website. As a regular user of the City website, I fail to see any fruit these two expenditures have brought to the website.
This Council seems to be adopting a GIT - R - DUN attitude, to the point some seem willing to jump ahead of the public consult process vis a vis the Strategic Plan update.
An example of your tax dollars at work ......
If you would like to view/download this 103 page report which cost many thousands of tax dollars to see what kind of long term benefit we actually got for our money click HERE.
I am convinced there is a vault in the bowels of city hall where studies and reports are simply sent to die, never actually being the basis for anything except more paralysis by analysis.
Well, we've yet to see if they will do any of the $220,000 core review recommendations but the CAO is apparently now hiring people after the purge.
ReplyDeleteThe action plan for the core review will come before council over the next month.
ReplyDeleteIf you watched council last night, it was commented by council that some changes have already started 😀
City hall has always been great with the studying and planning phase of governance. Where they have always fallen short is the implementation stage. I am reasonably confident that this council and admin will finally be able to move into the implementation stage and 'GIT-R-DUN' ........... of course only after they have decided that our core services are fully funded with a level of taxation we can afford. That seems to be a piece of the CSR that did not get much attention. No surprise though.
ReplyDeleteYes. Not much consideration of "core" in core. Now back to mega project tax expenditures and rehirings.
ReplyDelete"BIG things ahead for Nanaimo" Yeah right...... Big things cost big money. There is no magic bullet. Please, just put your guns down before you Councillors hurt someone.
ReplyDeleteCliff Marcil