“Council had set aside $350 thousand dollars in a contingency fund to pay for the ost of the review, however, KPMG’s cost to conduct the review has not been released” … hmmm let me guess….$350k? Did KPMG know they were the only bidder when they put in the bid?

Core review,the money they may find will cover the cost of the study we hope. Do a core review of our roads as the City looks towards 2015 guess they are praying for alot of snow to fill in the holes.We pay tax’s for service and get very little in return thats what really get people ticked off.

“KPMG’s cost to conduct the review has not been released” … hmmm let me guess….$350k”

“Did KPMG know they were the only bidder when they put in the bid?”

Having worked for many years on the building design end of things, in both “good” economic times and “poor” economic times, I know a bit about this topic, no matter what type of service contract one puts out. Request for proposals are slightly different than bids on prescriptive lump sum bids.

1. In order to get companies to bid one needs to call and be proactive about seeking bidders. Did the City do all it could in order to flush possible bidders out – give them a call “have you received ..” “will you be bidding” .. what are the obstacles to you bidding” ….

2. One key piece of info that is not made available is how many took out documents. How many documents were downloaded from the net? I do not know how bid packages were distributed, but any reasonable distribution system should require people to “register” their interest. Based on how many were taken out and how many bids came in, one can get a pretty good idea that there might be something wrong or right.

3. Any reasonable organization, especially a public one, should be opening bids in public, identify the bidder and the price. In the case of RFP’s that is not all that simple since methodology is one of the key evaluation areas.

4. A single bid is always a problem. There are several choices. To not open it in public would be a reasonable one. In that case, which we seem to have right now, it could be opened to see if the company met the conditions of the bid. It could very well be that they did not. Certainly price is of interest, although that may not be the only criteria the bid will be judged on.

If they have not got any good handle of items I listed under 1 and 2, they really have no good information to go on to come to a decision of whether to go with the bid and maybe negotiate parts they do not like and then decide to award based on the negotiations.

If they do have that type of information, then they may go back out to bid if there were obstacles which prevented people from bidding at this time or under the conditions required. If that happens, it would be detrimental to give out the bid price.

I am very curious as to why this happened. It could be as simple as tax time and year end for many corporations since these companies are often multi-disciplinary. Some of the staff that may become involved with such bids may be too busy elsewhere at the moment.

One has to wonder what kind of credentials would make you qualified to do such a review. Then that also leads one to wonder what kind of credentials the people managing the city affairs have and if there are significant efficiencies to be found and realized through the review, the kind that would justify a $350k investment, then wouldn’t that indicate the abject failure of the existing management structure at City Hall and indicate that their removal should be expedited?

whats a core review?

A core review, in this case, is an external audit of the operations of the cores services provided by an organization. People are typically aware of financial audits, althoug even that many do not quite understand.

The kind of audit to be conducted is to review all key services the City provides that are supposed to benefit the City and its residents.

It will review how the departments function, whether the results they achieve are measurable (is transportation doing a good job of maintaining roads for instance, compared to average standards of other muncipalities and even best standards and if not, why not, recommend changes to structures, to the way business is done, etc.)

Such reviews should be conducted internally on a regular basis, say 2 to 3 years and even 5 years, with an external review every 10 years or so. The internal audits can be done several deparments at a time on a rotational basis. Properly done, the internal auditor would be independent of the administration and report directly to the Mayor and Council.

Of course, one could argue that Council too should be audited by other than just voters who, as an entire amorphous group are really not all that good as has been shown over and over again.

Large organizations, both public and private, typically use some sort of system to evaluate how well they are doing in an effort to carry on in an environment called “continous improvement”.

why do the audit …we failed

Then we will need a core review of the core review winning bidder to ensure they are not just rubber stamping business as usual. Although I am for keeping work local I believe in this instance an outside entity should be used that is divorced from any influence by this city, either managment or political. KPMG on the surface looks little more than a strategist for business interests. The question is, is this core review a strategy to make this current political body look good or a strategy to actual clean up any deficiencies. I think some deficiencies are so glaring that it will be hard to sugar coat the outcome of this review.

I think there should be some questions asked of the manager who put this together beginning with why he thinks there was no competition for this work?

the lack of competition for a large project worth hundreds of thousands of dollars should set off alarm bells that there is a problem.

council’s decision to manage this by “committee” is ripe with all sorts of problems not the least of which is the RFP they came up with appears to have been viewed as unrealistic by many companies that do this type of work. So they passed.

Those companies obviously didn’t think it was possible to do a credible job with the large scope and limited time provided by the mayor and council within the budget they set. That has also likely driven up the cost.

psst … bang on!!

It stated that there was a “mandatory requirement” that the successful consultant submit all of the project deliverables to the City no later than September 30, 2012 = 6 months if they started on time.

I doubt that they could have since it said that the City anticipated entering into a professional services contract with a successful consultant by mid to late March, 2012.

Hey, how could they possbily do that if the closing date was the 14th? A few people should be reviewing the proposal(s), make a recommended selection and then seek approval from Council.

Accountants auditing. Sounds like wasted money. What would an accountant know about road maintenance, utilities, snow removal, etc.
Another bunch of wasted coin. Ask the front line city worker and he will have far more knowledge on how to save money on city services.

Okay, sorry about this, but some more information seems to be required.

Yes, KPMG and other “accounting” firms that have broadened their scope of operation are generally thought of as “accounting” firms.

But these days they have broadened their scope quite a bit to not only audit financial practices but also review business practices, chain of custody audits in operations such as forestry, even in some ways safety audits.

In order to do that they will either have KPMG employees who are professionals credentialed and experienced in the appropriate areas of business or will partner with the appropriate consultants to provide that experience.

Here is their site:
http://www.kpmg.com/ca/en/whatwedo/pages/default.aspx

If you look under advisory, it states:
“KPMG’s Advisory professionals work with clients to tackle issues and opportunities affecting their growth, GOVERNANCE, PERFORMANCE, and RISK MANAGEMENT.”

Many cities in the USA have Controllers/Auditors who act as internal auditors.

Here is an example from Los Angeles – you can see the work the auditor does. Far, far beyond just financial
http://controller.lacity.org/What_is_the_Office_of_the_Controller/index.htm

Portland, Oregon has a City Auditor. Actually it is one of 6 positions on City Council. It is an elected position and comes with a salary of around $100,000/year.

Here is the auditor’s office page:
http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor

“Ask the front line city worker and he will have far more knowledge on how to save money on city services.”

That would likely be one of the ways used to gather information, along with other sources.

The prupose of doing it externally is that there is considerably less likelihood of it being biased either intentionally or unintentionally..

I think the $350k would be better spent paying for a severance package for the city manager and getting someone in the position that can do their job.

Between the firing of McEwan and the ‘core review’ we are out a half a million without a single pot hole filled. Add in the mayors new assistant for a position that was a part time position with past mayors, and we see waste piled on waste and the cost downloaded to home owners.

I decided to “google” KPMG Prince George and boy i got shocked . I recognized a name as a partner in our local firm .Then proceeded to “google” his name and what came up was the Select Buisness Commitee of the city of Prince george Appointed by mayor Sherri Green. Oh my there is this mans name. Tell me this not a conflict of interest.Or going to be little bias.