PENNIES FROM IRB HEAVEN - Part III

More Consultant Fingers in the Pie

And so the consultant roll call continues. Another member of the "IRB Army Corp of Consultants”--a company that WAS chosen publicly--is Burton & Associates. Burton was hired to perform a Revenue Sufficiency Analysis for Sewer/Solid Waste Funds. The purpose of this $30,000+ “FY 2008 Utility Rate Study” was to tell the City what it SHOULD BE charging its residents for garbage and sewer.

Burton’s report is very well done and user-friendly. Top notch work professionally presented. But, shouldn’t the rate calculation for enterprise funds that are designed to be self-supporting be fairly simple?

TOTAL COST OF PROVIDING THE SERVICES

divided by

TOTAL NUMBER OF RESIDENT CUSTOMERS

No spreadsheets. No bar graphs. Just simple third-grade addition, subtraction and division. It’s only when the “shuffling” of monies between funds, “mystery” loans/transfers and other financial tomfoolery come into play that a high-priced consultant is required to set the bar. According to Burton & Associates Vice-President Burnham, IRB now needs his company to perform a similar analysis---EVERY TWO TO THREE YEARS! Aye aye aye!

IRB even has consultants for its consultants. Burton’s group was hired to prepare a rate study and Rob Garner/GCSC was engaged to make sure Burton was working with the right financial information! New consultants seem to pop up regularly leaving commission meeting audiences shrugging shoulders, shaking heads and scratching various parts of the anatomy as to how we’re affording all these “experts.”

Some of these consulting companies get “signed on” without even so much as a casual mention publicly. For instance, most commission meeting goers knew nothing about the guy contracted for the unpleasant job of telling us that the town is on the verge of bellyupski until he stepped to the microphone and unleashed the news. This gentleman was hired in open view for another much less significant task, but the go-ahead for the “bigger kahuna” happened behind the scenes. Why all the secrecy? Didn’t the citizens demanding answers and criticizing the commission for “doing nothing” deserve to know that “something” was in process?

At the risk of redundancy…where in the wide, wide world of sports is all this dough coming from to pay this bevy of consultants if IRB is in dire straights?

Nancy Obarski

Beach Trail/IRB

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