At the Mayor and Council meeting on Tuesday, the council was asked to consent to a purchase order of just under $200k to hire consultants to help with the upcoming zoning ordinance rewrite. I voted in favor of it, as did the other council members. But since my knee-jerk reaction to hearing the word “consultant” is always to ask “Do we really need these guys?”, I’ll briefly explain why I got to yes.
It comes down to time and tradeoffs. I think it’s important for us to overhaul the zoning ordinance as one effort rather than piecemeal. But that effort will take a lot of hours of grunt work (research, drafting, revising, etc.). With the consultants, it’s projected to take two years. If the City’s Planning Department did it all themselves, it would take closer to five years or crowd out everything else they do. Granted, you might not see a preoccupied Planning Department as such a bad thing at first (“Less code enforcement? Hold my beer!”), but reality would bite if it starts taking years to get a permit to build a deck.
The City could deal with the workload by hiring another staff member or two, but that would be an expensive proposition: along the lines of $500k over five years with salaries and benefits. Since this is a one-off project, the City would then be left with extra staff it doesn’t need after the rewrite is done. In comparison, we pay the consultants their $200k fee and say goodbye to them once they’re done. Some staff time will still go into working with the consultants on the project, perhaps to the tune of $100k if you convert the time tradeoffs into dollar terms (though we pay those existing staff salaries regardless). But whichever way you look at it, hiring the consultants comes out cheaper than going it alone.
So, that’s to say: a time-limited, one-off project like this is what consultants’ services are best suited for. There are some other advantages, namely that the company helped with the Brunswick Forward comprehensive plan and so is already familiar with our situation. It’s also worth noting that the previous council already budgeted $150k, or three-quarters of the cost (and $100k of that comes from federal funding), so what we’ve committed to spending in the next fiscal year is an additional $50k, not the whole sticker price.
That said, the consultants aren’t going to do this thing unsupervised and then just hand us a final draft to approve. There are several surveys and public input sessions built into their quote, which you can see in the 10/22 Mayor and Council meeting agenda (link below). The Planning Commission and Mayor and Council will be involved, too. Personally, I’ll be keeping a keen eye on the process, since I think it’s one of the most important things the City will do during my term as a councilman. I’ll do my best to explain my thinking as I go.
Click here for background on the item up for vote.