(With apologies to those City administrators and staff who DON'T just "mail it in"; who bring their best everyday, under what must sometimes be very challenging conditions, working for this City).
Councilor Dennis, did it ever occur to you that one of the reasons that we use so many consultants is because we don't have the in-house ability for staff to do all these studies and the work involved?
And why might that be?
Because under Mike Bradley’s leadership, the City’s management turnover has been frequent and costly. Particularly, in the wake of his 2018 reelection, after being found to have harassed several top administrators.
A reelection in which you vigorously supported him.
The mayor’s harassment of our former CAO and other top administrators made plain his years-long, inappropriate interference in the administration of the City; resulting in an oppressive culture of either sycophancy, or staff keeping their heads down and “mailing it in”, which became the suboptimal, but necessary survival mode in Sarnia city hall.
And after he was reelected in 2018, the prospect of a continuation of that toxic work environment precipitated the massive turnover that destroyed institutional memory, cohesion and team synergies, that take years to build up and that any such organization cannot perform optimally without developing and maintaining.
Remember how great our new IT guy was? He came in and shook up years of stagnation. Recall, how you and Bluewater Power officials praised him and how he won awards for the progress he was making? He was making wholesale positive changes to our IT system. It would have saved us millions (for example, by protecting us from ransomware, which before him, we were woefully vulnerable to). He was also working on free downtown wifi, for business and tourism, etc. Then, Mike gets reelected and boom, he's outta here.
That happened to almost every single senior manager after Mike was reelected; a near wholesale exodus. And when they went, they took word of Sarnia's reputation to the rarified world of municipal administrative professionals.
Do you think as many of them of the quality and integrity of a Marg Misek Evans (now, the much lauded/awarded CAO of Tecumseh; our loss is their gain), or Jane Cooper, etc., etc. are beating a path to Sarnia?
Instead, for some reason, we can only seem to attract grads, right out of university, with little experience, looking to pad their CV and get the hell out of Dodge.
Or… well, let’s just say, remember all the turnover (and its reasons) from the first batch of managers/dept. Heads, after Mike’s 2018 reelection?
Is it any wonder we need outside help?
And then, there's the practicalities and costs of hiring and maintaining that in-house capacity on a full time basis. Do you want to pay 6 figures to each of another 30+ professional expert staff so we can actually do all the additional full-time equivalent employee hours of the kind of specialized work that we hire consultants to do, as needed?
You'd be the first one screaming about our ballooning staff budget.
Finally, the last couple of years have seen us finally tackling the infrastructure deficit and unfunded liabilities backlog, with us making the most capital investment in decades.
Do people want the potholes fixed, or not?
This, more than anything else, is likely what has caused the big surge in the total consultant numbers that you were after. It takes armies of engineers and technicians to plan and manage this big increase in work.
Again, do you want us to hire them full-time?
You, of all people - especially, as an insider to the world of Mike Bradley - ought to understand the truth of the above realities. But, if this isn't food for thought for you, maybe a few people reading this might just get it.
Steve Loxton is founder and moderator of the Facebook group, “Sarnia-Lambton Politics and Governance”.