Today we pick up where we left off on Wednesday, outlining a thorough budget planning and consultation process for the 2003 city budget. And it's time to give credit where credit is due: It seems as though council agrees with the recommendations from yours truly. To say that the 2002 budget process - passed on March 27th was a rushed affair - is a colossal understatement. Flying through council and committees at Warp 7 (yes, I'm a trekkie) would be a more apt description of path the budget took.

Council, or more precisely, the Corporate Services and Economic Development committee, is to be applauded for the 2003 budget timetable it recently laid out. Councillors and city staff will run pre-budget consultations from May 20th until the end of June. A budget directions report will come back to the corporate services committee by July 16th. One week later, this amended report will go to full council.

By October 1st, staff intends to deliver a long-range financial plan (as discussed in this space on Wednesday) to corporate services. Again this amended document will go to full council one week later. On November 13th, the draft capital and operating budgets will be tabled and taxpayers can then comb through the documents. Public discussion will follow for the ensuing three weeks. In early December, standing committees will review various components of the budget documents and if all goes according to plan, council will review and approve the budget sometime in January.

While the timeline is ambitious, it is a marked improvement over the current process. As well, the budget documents themselves will be improved. Some of the better suggestions include "defining key terms for common understanding." Indeed, a read of the budget reveals city specific acronyms which are sometimes confusing to casual watchers of city hall.

Other worthy improvements include a listing of capital works-in-progress, details on agencies supported by the city's business development arm and building a full-text search capability on the city's website. Council and staff deserve praise for trying to improve upon the transparency and timing of the budget process. The key is to actually make it work.

While the 2003 budget process timetable was the most compelling part of the recent corporate services committee agenda, the costs paid for consultants last year formed a very disconcerting part of this same agenda. Over 111 firms received contracts for $100,000 or more of city work. Of this group, 24 firms netted work in excess of $500,000 and 18 companies in this group of 24, billed the city for $1 million or more worth of work.

In addition, the city sought just under $2 million of legal services from 21 firms around town even though we employ a battery on in-house lawyers on the payroll.

Of course, contracting out and "buying" professional services as opposed to "making them in-house" in many instances is an acceptable, not to mention, taxpayer-friendly manner of conducting the city's affairs. Especially when one considers that each $100,000 salaried employee (middle to upper management level) usually costs, on average, a municipality at least $142,000 when benefits, overhead and other expenses are factored into the equation.

However, council should be asking a few questions. First and foremost, was all this outside activity necessary? The city bureaucracy is now bigger than the individual totals from its predecessor governments combined. Are in-house staff being utilized to their full capacity?

Next up, a careful review of this list is in order. It appears as though several communications firms did business with the city along with several of the major accounting/consulting houses. Given that the city is feverishly placing ads in our three daily newspapers and every community newspaper going, how much more outside help is needed? Ditto on the accounting, consulting side and human resources management fronts, what are all these firms doing? At the very least, council should be seeking clarification.

The mayor's response to the $70 million figure was plausible enough noting the old RMOC government did $61 million worth of business in it's final year of operation in 2000. But this leads us back to the preceding questions? Could some of this activity been carried out in-house with existing staff?

Municipal restructuring was supposed to rationalize human resources, information technology support, purchasing functions, fleet management and many other municipal tasks. Perhaps council can find some economies of scale by applying the same logic to its outsourced contracting portfolio. This is not a call for a bigger bureaucracy, but is a call for effective stewardship and an ongoing review of how council spends our tax dollars: It's called good government.