Less than six months after the last time this issue was brought up, Coun. Brian Skakun is back poring over the list of city vendors who supply more than $25,000 of goods and services to the city each year. He wants to know who are the companies with numbers or ambiguous titles for names on the list and what exactly they did for the city.
His desire for financial transparency is commendable but it has to be balanced against administrative efficiency and cost.
As corporate service director Kathleen Soltis explained to council on Monday, senior city managers already have the authority to approve projects up to $1 million. City expenditures that don't require council approval go through the city's capital and operating plans, which are approved by council each year during the budget process.
So let's apply some transparency to Skakun's request.
What he really wants to do is to approve the same spending that he and his council colleagues already gave city staff the approval to spend.
That's not oversight, that's micro-management. It's wasteful and it's redundant.
City department managers earn their six-figure salaries because they are charged with delivering the goals set out for them by the city manager and council, within the budget set out for them, also by the city manager and council.
For example, let's say a well-known office supply company, owned by a group of local investors under the generic company name PG123, is supplying pens and paper to the city at a cost of $50,000 per year. By invoicing the city under its PG123 name, there's nothing going on except regular administrative business. The company supplied the goods ordered at the cost it said it would.
Furthermore, safeguards are built into the system.
Let's say a city employee has been given a budget -- let's say $100,000 -- to cover the city's office supplies, of which $50,000 are for pens and paper. If the pens and paper disappear, that employee has some explaining to do. If that employee goes to their manager and says "sorry, our vendor wants to charge $60,000 for office supplies this year," the manager can either approve the increase, knowing the extra $10,000 can come from somewhere else in his or her overall department budget, challenge the employee to find that extra $10,000 from the remaining $50,000 in the office supplies budget or tell the employee to go find another vendor that can meet the pens-and-paper budget.
Whatever decision that is made is then documented and accounted for through invoices and purchases orders.
These are routine and everyday decisions made by city staff that do not require the oversight of mayor and council.
Furthermore, it can't be stressed enough that this spending has already been approved by council when it signs off on the city's operating budget.
It is the job of mayor and council at budget time to question whether the city should be spending $100,000 per year on office supplies and ask the city manager if it could be done for $80,000. It's not the job of mayor and council to dive into the costs of everyday decisions when they've already approved the necessary spending.
Mayor Shari Green's flippant and disrespectful retort to Skakun about looking up the name of the suppliers in the phone book if he's looking for clarity doesn't help since PG123 from our example doesn't have an office or a phone number. Her comment, however, does open up a possible solution to this nagging tempest in a teapot.
Mayor and council likely have the authority to pass a bylaw requiring all city vendors providing more than $25,000 of goods and services to the city each year to invoice the city under their public name, rather than the name of their corporate owner. In other words, give the problem to the vendors. If PG123 in the office supply example wants that $50,000 pens-and-paper contract, they can either change their accounting practices to keep the business or they can walk away.
It would give curious councillors like Skakun the transparency he's looking for without generating extra work for city staff.
And if Skakun still wants more information after that, the onus should be on him to say why and it should be a better excuse than "I'm a city councillor and I want to know."
