Cost Of Changing City’s Financial Reporting Strategy Would Outweigh Benefits
Prince George, B.C – After reviewing a suggestion by Councillor Brian Skakun to adopt a financial reporting strategy similar to the City of Quesnel’s, the expense of doing so has been found to outweigh the benefits…
The City of Prince George already reports its financial transactions in accordance with the Financial Information Act, which requires all expenses in excess of $25-thousand dollars be reported within six months of the fiscal year end (December 31st). The Finance and Audit Committee review found it would take between 64 and 90-hours of Financial Services staff time to implement and maintain such a reporting system, and that does include the time it would take to review each item for its implications under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
"We do have one other reporting aspect which is done more frequently," Director of Corporate Services, Kathleen Soltis told Councillors at Monday night’s meeting. "We have a monthly purchasing report which comes before council as an information item and it shows the different levels of purchasing approvals that are made, so you can see items that have been approved by council or through the City Manager’s purchasing authority, or through the Manager of Supply Services’ authority."
Skakun said he’s looking for a monthly reporting of all expenses incurred by the City. "I looked at their (Quesnel’s) agenda and it posted all of their expenditures for the month – there might have been one month that I seen there was $10-thousand-and-something in legal fees, maybe 5- or 600 in entertainment – it broke it down into a whole bunch of different categories into how they’re spending their money on items," he said.
"And it might have generated more questions, but I mean, each one of those expenditures should have been defendable," Skakun added.
"From my perspective, every expenditure that we have at the city is defendable. We’ve got staff that have different approval amounts and limits and it works its way up the chain, if you will," said Mayor Shari Green. "The challenge is around 90 hours a year of staff time – that’s over two weeks of one person’s time to produce this report and make sure all the right stuff is in there and formatted in the right way and that we don’t have information that shouldn’t be a part of that, such as legal information."
Councillor Albert Koehler said he felt City staff was already providing more information than required by law and he didn’t see the point of burdening them with more work.
The Finance and Audit Committee did direct staff to make the financial transactions report more easily accessible on the City’s website – it had already been there, but was difficult to find. It’s now a link on the left-hand side of the Home page that shows a calculator icon and says ‘Financial Information’.
Councillor Skakun said, "I’m going to have to look at it myself, your Worship, and just feel it out because this doesn’t go far enough, but it is going to go a ways towards improving transparency."
Comments
So a maximum of 90 hours at say, $40/hour…heck let’s call it $50/hour…is $4500.
It’s astounding how these municipal politicians justify their decisions. They don’t see the cost-benefit trade off in spending less than five grand on a new process that will improve transparency to the taxpayers that employ them…but they think nothing about dropping six and seven figures on one stupid decision after another.
Where was the “cost-benefit” analysis on paying Horizon Air $400K of our money to fly empty planes back and forth to Seattle for six months?
I guess when you’re spending taxpayers dollars…it’s okay to drop half a million with no rationale thought whatsoever…but God forbid we spend the equivalent of one PG Pulp employee’s bi-weekly paycheque to be more open and upfront with the people whose wallets we are constantly dipping into. Unreal.
I’m willing to kick in $100.00. Are there 44 others that might be interested. We could send cheques to Opinion 250 to hold the funds. If the City doesn’t do anything .then donate it to charity.
Take the estimated annual cost of adding hexafluorosilicic acid (sodium fluoride effluent) to the City’s tap water at $2 per person, multiplied by 75,000 = $150,000 annually. 3% of that would already be the needed amount of $4,500 which the mayor sees as a huge tremendous unaffordable expenditure.
The unnecessary habit of topping up natural calcium fluoride with the man-made industrial effluent sodium fluoride is supported by this city’s decision makers as financially, morally and ethically sound and healthful.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Where there is no will, there is no way…
More transparency is unaffordable? Yep!
City Hall would not want transparency. The unjustifible expenditures and poor finance decisions would come to light more readily. The cost is a pitance compared to what will be spent on River road, the city heating system, new building for the purchasing people, downtown property purchases, etc.
Double spam from PrineGeorge again. Go figure.
Oh boy, I spelled Prince wrong. Must be that damn fluoride.
Great post, But!
And PrinceGeorge, the reason double posts occur is if you hit “refresh” after you’ve posted something but before you leave the page and come back. The Op250 server thinks you want to keep posting and posting. Next time you want to check back for additional comments…just go to the home page once after you’ve made your post…then you can go back to the individual article and keep hitting refresh without fear of repostinng.
I call bull. We are not asking for balanced books every month, this could be a simple report, don’t they have computers?
Not sure why people are all revved up about this. The annual financial statements are published for all to see on the City web site. The financial information is pretty comprehensive. I wonder how many people who think negatively about the City’s position on this have ever even read the annual report. I’d be willing to bet not many. Do you really think a monthly version would be more illuminating? All you see is the numbers, you don’t see what goes into them. You’re looking for smoking guns, but the harsh truth is that most people don’t understand financial statements in the first place. It would probably just lead to more stupid questions from uneducated people. I’m not a fan of City Hall and the people who run it, but I think they made the right call on this one.
A couple of things do stand out in the information that they do release. The number of people earning over 100k per year is more than 50 out of 904…..they must be counting every part time and casual to try to skew the numbers. To get an accurate number the part timers should be factored as FT equivalent.
If the number of full time city employees is in the 750 range it means that 1 out of every 15 is making over 100k and more than 1 in 4 is over 75k, nice work if you can get it.
One other thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was the $151,093.67 charge from PG Taxi Holdings…~$414.00 every day of the year for taxis??? Can someone shed light on what other services they might be supplying.
The city’s website does have a interactive annual report, but after waiting 5 minutes for the asset libraries to load I gave up.
With a little luck the municipal audit office will be up and running in the near future.
Hey Sine, we don’t want the financial statements..maybe a list of cheques written? plus internal costs like salaries and bones etc
oopsies, bonuses… I guess kinda like good boy bones.
Sine Nomine…ignoring your remark about uneducated people not knowing how to read a report. I think that is part of the issue. We want to be able to know where the money is going WITHOUT havng to be a CPA to muddle through all the reams and reams of reports. It is easy to hide expenditures when it’s allowed to be made so convoluted the average person can’t understand it. I don’t think education has anything to do with it. Would you say someone who doesn’t know how to wire a house because of electrical knowledge is uneducated, or just maybe uneducated in the trade of electrical wiring? Don’t get the two confused.
ExPat-PGRes, thanks for the explanation of the unintentional double posts! I have noticed that on some occasions it takes a long time for the comment to be sent after the Comment button is hit. Will be more patient and careful in the future!
Duffer “Double spam from PrineGeorge again. Go figure.”
All the communities in B.C. which STOPPED fluoridation with the industrial waste effluent hexafluorosilicic acid (+ lead, arsenic and mercury) didn’t think that mentioning fluoridation is spam!
Williams Lake, Lake Cowichan, Kamloops, and Kitimat paid attention and stopped!
97% of the province is now fluoride addition free and you don’t read “spam” about it in the media!
The dentists there still apply fluoride varnish to teeth if the patient agrees, the drugstores still sell fluoridated toothpaste to customers who want to buy it!
As for being forced to drink the stuff and shower with…that is another matter!
Call it spam or whatever, it’s a poison!
PG, keep ranting!!! I love it…
Duffer:”PG, keep ranting!!! I love it…”
Thank you for your endorsement and encouragement to keep going!
I was getting worried that perhaps you were getting a bit irritated! Thankfully that isn’t so! I have a lot more information to educate as many people as possible about the effluent chemical sodium fluoride so there will be many more opportunities for you to embrace with love all my comments!
This decision makes a mockery of our current council. They probably review their budgets weekly. They probably use computers to do it. I use accounting software at home and at the office. It only takes seconds to generate a statement.
Comments for this article are closed.