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Public speaker urges council to scrutinize Consilience contract and Metro spending
Summary
A resident urged the council to review a proposed $206,000 contract to Consilience Group and questioned county priorities on transit spending and engineering costs, suggesting hiring an auditor or transit officer.
Tom Sullivan, a resident who registered to speak during the council’s public forum, told the County Council on May 20 that the executive’s proposed $206,000 contract for Consilience Group to provide an effectiveness study for the Department of Human Services deserved closer council scrutiny.
“Most likely, this will be for more than $600,000 as there will be a 2 year option,” Tom Sullivan said, urging the council to question whether the county director should develop the strategy in-house.
Sullivan also criticized a $232,977 engineering-services figure that he said included an additional $30,203 and asked the county auditor to review that cost. He raised broader concerns about transit spending and Bi-State (referred to in the transcript as “Biostate”), claiming that Metrolink has “gone through huge amounts of tax dollars while making transit worse for many riders.”
Sullivan recommended using part of a $200,000,000 allocation to hire an auditor or a public transit officer so council members would have better oversight: “To take a $100,000 from the 200,000,000 and hire an auditor or public transit officer makes a lot of sense,” he said. Sullivan urged the council to ensure decisions are made with fuller information about transit operations.
These comments were part of the public forum; council members did not take immediate action on the requests during the meeting.
