After playing the iconic Star Wars character Chewbacca in Star Wars for 38 years, Peter Mayhew finally hung up his Wookie costume in 2015. For the first film after his retirement, The Last Jedi, in 2017, he was hired back by Disney and is listed in the film’s credits as a “Chewbacca consultant.”
Probably unnecessary, but hey, Disney has billions and billions of dollars to burn, so if they wanna waste some on a Chewbacca consultant, so be it.
But y’know who doesn’t have billions to burn? Pelham Town Hall. So why the heck are they burning so much cash on superfluous consultants?
The answer is that municipalities right across the country are hopelessly addicted to consultants. They flush so much money down the consultant drain that one starts to wonder why city halls have staff at all, let alone a small army of Sunshine List staffers soaking the taxpayers for millions in annual payroll.
Most frustratingly, there seems to be no stopping the consultant gravy train. Even when well-meaning councillors attempt to do exactly that. At a recent Pelham council meeting, Ward 1 Councillor Wayne Olson asked why Town Hall was dishing out $71,000 for a consulting contract related to a “user fee review study.”
Fair question, especially since this study didn’t appear to be particularly difficult, and could have likely been completed by the Town’s existing staff, who we are already paying to do this exact kind of work. Alas, he was overruled, with some mumbo jumbo explanation about how this consultant has the expertise needed to do this job properly. They probably used the word “synergy” in there somewhere.
Another councillor remarked that this $71,000 consultant fee was a “worthwhile expense.” But was it?
A quick scan of the Sunshine List shows me that Pelham has a director of planning ($161,000) and a director of corporate services ($161,000) and a director of public works ($143,000) and a manager of public works ($119,000) and a manager of financial services ($119,000) and yet, none of them have the time or expertise to review the Town’s fee structure?
Consultancy is, as a whole, one of the bigger scams going on with our governments, and the problem goes beyond city halls. Last year the federal defence department spent $1.2 billion on consultant fees. The fed's IT department employees thousands upon thousands of tech nerds, and yet when it came time to make the ArriveCan app, they used a consultancy firm to to make it for a whopping $59 million dollar price tag. That’s a lot of cash for a janky app that barely ever worked and was abandoned within months.
Most amusing of all, last year the federal government dished out a $670,000 contract to a consultant who was tasked with telling them… how to cut back on consultant spending. That’s like asking an arsonist for fire prevention tips.
The most frustrating part, from my perspective, is that all this consulting money is just splashing around in circles between the same handful of people who are often the same ones dishing it out. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen a planning director at a city hall “retire,” only to open a “planning consultant” firm a month later and start collecting fat contracts from the same city hall he just left. It’s ludicrous. But extremely lucrative if you’re the guy getting the consultant contract, or the guy dishing them out with an eye towards opening his own consulting firm in a few years who wants to make sure the gravy train stays chugging.
I swear, I’m going to get in on this scam and open my own consulting firm. My plan is to bid on a bunch of municipal consulting contracts, and undercut all the other bidders by half. But then all I do is send them back my “expert analysis,” which is just a printout of that town’s Sunshine List employees with a note that says, “Have these people do it.”
James Culic is the soon-to-be founder of Municipal Merry Go Round Faux-sultancy LLC. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of this page, or synergize your inner planner and outline a 12-point action plan/letter to the editor.
