No plans for sweeping service review report

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

It is designed to trim the fat, to tone up the city’s processes and service delivery and, most importantly, it is designed to save cash – lots of it.

Yet council has no plans for such a thing.

Tabled for nearly three years, The Oshawa Express has learned that staff and council currently have no plans for moving ahead with a core service review (CSR).

A full CSR looks at all aspects of a city’s operations, including services offered to the public, such as waste collection and snow removal, along with internal operations in city departments. The goal is to find inefficiencies in processes and provide different options for delivering certain services, all of which are angled towards efficiency and saving the city money.

The idea to undertake such a review was kicked around at council back in 2012 as part of the work that went into the city’s financial strategy. However, it was tabled, and has more or less remained in that state, staying simply a footnote to each council agenda since then.

The closest the city ever came to such a review was in 2013, when council ordered former auditor general Ron Foster to undertake a review of city services, even going as far as to allocate an additional $30,000 to his office’s budget and assign more staff to get it done. The scope of that review included reviews and audits for the city’s vehicle fleet, parks, waste management and municipal law enforcement and licensing services. Council at the time opted for this cheaper option for review after learning that other municipalities had opted for costly consultants with no real results.

However, following the release of the auditor’s report on the purchase of 199 Wentworth St. E. for the city’s new consolidated operations depot in May 2013 and the ensuing hurricane of controversy that eventually led to the elimination of the auditor’s office, the work was never completed.

Despite that, city officials claim a similar ongoing continuous improvement program (CIP) is in place that ensures these types of saving are realized without a CSR.

“We’re always working on it,” says city manager Jag Sharma.

“We are very active within a continuous improvement environment.”

In a report outlining the scope of his work, the former auditor general predicted that through CIP reviews and audits of city services, potential cost reductions of $1.5 million in 2014 and $2 million in 2015 could be realized. However, on top of that, by doing a full CSR, the city stood to save an additional $1.6 million in 2014, nearly $150,000 in 2015 and approximately $2 million this year.

The proposed CSR would have included options for rationalizing city operations, including alternative service delivery options, which would include the possibility of contracting out certain services or even uploading them to the region.

“To achieve additional cost reductions beyond those contemplated with the continuous improvement program, council needs to include the examination of full alternative service delivery options within the scope of the core service review,” Foster’s report reads.

The city last considered such a move in 2012, when a staff recommendation came forward suggesting that waste collection be uploaded to the Region of Durham, a decision that could have saved approximately $3.6 million. However, councillors voted to keep waste collection in-house.

Now, without an auditor general in place, these sorts of reviews are done at the staff level and while Sharma says the hard dollars saved through continuous improvement are not tracked, it does not mean they are not there.

“Many of these projects, when you look at them combined, what they help do is offset some of our staffing needs where we have pressure in certain areas. When we can do these projects successfully, it begins to reduce some of our staffing needs as we go forward and it allows us to balance and look at how we can help with managing growing pressures of a growing city.”

Sharma points to the city’s decision last year to allow NAPA Auto Parts to handle all of the city’s fleet and auto part requirements, something the city report says saves on staff and programming costs.

The city also works with external consultant KPMG, which acts as the municipality’s internal auditor, making recommendations about certain processes and functions.

Most recently, the firm was involved with a review of the city’s accounts payable and receivable functions and a review of the staff payroll and overtime systems.

“They certainly bring that outside experience where they can help push us in directions where we may not have thought,” Sharma says.

Mayor John Henry says he is happy with the work the city is doing with the CIP and is not concerned about the seemingly delayed state of a CSR.

“It’s not in limbo,” he says.

“We use continuous improvement here every day…down the road it may pop up again, but I’m really happy with the inroads we’ve been making with the consolidated depot and some of our other facilities in town.”

According to early city reports, by consolidating city operations at the Wentworth Street location, which is now the home of approximately 230 city employees in the fleet, parks and rec, human resources and operations department, could save the city $550,000 annually.

However, due to additional repairs on the building, along with planned renovations at the city’s other depot locations, it is unclear if those savings will be realized. Henry did not say whether a report on the final numbers for the depot would be coming to council when asked previously by The Express.

The CSR remains as a tabled item on council’s agenda and it seems, for now, that is where it will remain.

“We are putting our mind to it, but it still remains tabled,” Sharma says.

“We don’t have a report going forward to council as of yet.”