$15.1m consultant spending criticised by councillors

Consultants' costs of more than $15 million were strongly criticised by two councillors at yesterday's Queenstown Lakes District Council utilities committee meeting.

Crs Vanessa van Uden and Gillian Macleod were unimpressed by revelations the council spent $48.5 million last year on capital projects such as roading, water and sewerage and of that, $15.1 million went to consultants and for "forward design".

QLDC engineering services general manager Mark Kunath said projects completed in the 2007-08 year included the Wakatipu Recycling Centre, road rehabilitations in Wilson's Bay, the Crown Range and Robins Rd, and stage 1A of the Gorge Rd upgrade.

Non-physical work included a consent application for Project Shotover, the Wakatipu Transport Strategy and the Wanaka Transport and Parking Strategy.

Work started and carried into the current financial year included Project Pure, in Wanaka, and the Royal Burn/Glencoe Rd safety upgrade.

However, Cr van Uden pointed out a lot of money was spent on consultants.

"This is my absolute concern - I look at $15 million, mainly on consultant spending," she said.

"For the money we spent . . .

I don't see we get a lot of bang for our bucks."

As an outspoken critic of the council's procurement strategy of having a list of preferred contractors, Cr van Uden said the council needed to determine whether it was increasing efficiency in council spending.

The "top two consultant companies" contracted by the council had received $10 million worth of QLDC work in the last financial year and the council needed to prove to ratepayers they were "delivering good value" under the procurement strategy.

She was backed up by Cr Macleod, who wanted to know if the council was in a "competitive situation".

She also questioned the feasibility of "forward design" in uncertain economic times- this was the planning for future projects "to have in the drawer" waiting to be implemented.

"I'm just very uncertain about the budget in the future. Shouldn't we just plan on the ones we can afford?"

"Mr Kunath said there always had been a "proportion of the work" which required "consultation spend".

"As a ballpark figure . . . 5% of the project value will be spent on consultants and that concept design phase," he said.

The forward design concept was in its first year and Mr Kunath expected the annual spending to taper off to "less than $7 million" over the next two years.

However, he said the QLDC was under-resourced when it came to staff compared with other councils and spent more on consultants because of it.

He said QLDC's spending was higher than others in the industry.