City needs to look at all sides
The City of Oshawa thinks it has solved the puzzle.
Imagine a Rubik’s Cube, one side flush in all blue, resting on a table. The city is smiling, its chin resting on the wood beside it, staring at its proud accomplishment.
Fire Hall 6, the consolidated operations depot, the recently approved LED street lighting project.
From that angle, everything looks complete, and this is the side it always turns to the public and media to show just how great of a job it has done.
It looks great on the surface, but when someone tries to stand up and take a look at the other sides of the puzzle, the city tries to cover the cube with its hands like a child and shout, “No, don’t look!”
One of those squares tucked away on a hidden side of the puzzle, something that could actually help the city to find savings, is the core service review, an item that has been tabled on council’s agenda for more than three years. In a nutshell, the report would take a sweeping look at the city’s processes and methods of operation and recommend new (and cheaper) ways of doing them. Some of the options go so far as to possibly recommend outsourcing certain operations or even uploading some items to the regional level.
Perhaps some of them are broad steps, but are they not worth considering? And of course, the review is going to cost money. That is the main reason council did not go ahead with a review back in 2013, when the option first appeared on the table. However, the cost of this review can not outweigh the eventual benefits.
City council recently approved the approximately $8.5-million LED street lighting project. This is a project for which the city will be taking out a 10-year loan. The expectation is that, in the end, these new lights will save serious dollars on energy and maintenance costs, with those savings eventually making up for that initial loan.
Could the CSR not have the same eventual result? The former auditor general noted that through reviews of a series of city processes, he could save the city nearly $4 million over three years starting in 2014. So is this not a worthwhile review?
The city believes it is already doing the equivalent of a CSR, using what it calls a continuous improvement program. However, when asked just how much taxpayer money has been saved under this program, no answer could be given.
It is time for the city to stand up from the table and take a look at all sides.