Data on external consultants engaged by the City of Launceston council has not been recorded by the council. The City of Launceston council says it has not maintained a specific database for external consultants after repeated requests for the information made by The Examiner.
This year, the council has used external consultants to look into free parking, shopping in the city, organisational restructure, building heights, and has requested an external consultant be used for a review into Cityprom.
However, Launceston Chamber of Commerce executive officer Neil Grose said it's not unreasonable for this data to be recorded.
The first request was made to the council in June to find out how many consultants had been engaged. The Examiner was consistently told the council was working on providing the information.
To see if there had been an increase in the number of external consultant reports requested, The Examiner asked how many reports had been commissioned in the past five years.
The council was also asked what the reports looked into, how much they cost and what has been implemented as a result of the studies.
However, the council's general manager Michael Stretton said the level of information sought by The Examiner was "granular".
"The City of Launceston stands ready to assist The Examiner with all reasonable requests for information," Mr Stretton said.
"However, the council does not maintain specific databases of the consultancies engaged across the organisation at the granular level sought."
Mr Stretton said the council was $110m a year business that delivered many projects.
As a result to the questions, the council has formed the view the data would be useful and is implementing changes to its reporting systems to make the information available in the future.
"However, this work will take time to complete as it is being accommodated alongside our business as usual workloads," Mr Stretton said.
"It should be noted that the council provides a significant level of financial detail in our audited annual report each year, as well as in our annual budget papers, to ensure the community has oversight of how the council is spending ratepayer funds."
Mr Grose said it would not be unreasonable to expect the council to know what consultants they have engaged, and at what cost and for what desired outcome.
"It is particularly important to scrutinise the outcomes of those consultancies and if their recommendations have been adopted or not, and if not, why not," he said.
Mr Grose said using consultants seems to be an increasingly large component of the many decision-making processes in local governments of all sizes, not just City of Launceston.
"Generally speaking, consultants should only be used where the appropriate skills required are not already available internally," he said.
"Increasing numbers of consultancies either indicates the need for very specialist knowledge to provide advice on complex issues or that the skills to provide quality information are not available all ready."
COMMENT
Now this is supposed to be “NEWS” but Council watchers already knew all this and it has been an open secret for over a decade. CONCERNED CITIZENS and RATEPAYERS have even been to the MINISTER, the OMBUDSMAN, the DIRECTOR OF LOCAL GOVT. and the AUDITOR GENERAL and this discovery now is bewildering. It cannot be a discovery so there must be more to it than meets the eye.
What do ‘disenchanted citizen’ who pay some of the highest rates levied in the nation have to do to get information? Whatever they might do, if they keep on with their questioning, will increasingly expose them to SECTION 62 of the Local Govt. Act – http://www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/tas/consol_act/lga1993182/s62a.html – which is clearly being used to obfuscate accountability. Of courseclosing down unwelcomed enquiry for whatever reason is what has been going on.
So, who is to blame actually? It has to be the ‘elected 12’ without any doubt whatsoever. They have been alerted to the issue and all that they have done is sit on their hands. Then again, serially and surreally the evidence is that ‘management’ treats elected representatives with disregard – and as often as not with utter distain. So, we seem to have reached an impasse and one where the General Manager seems to be behaving in an unconscionable manner and adopting stonewall tactics.
At last THE EXAMINER is paying attention and the Chamber of Commerce also seems to have wandered out of malaise albeit way too late. One needs to ask who is covering whose backside and have perhaps discovered that they have been taken for dills?
