The Southwest Wake News recently published the council candidate responses to various questions. The comment attributed to Cheri Lee : "One instance would be utilizing the town staff more for project research and compilation instead of hiring outside agencies and spending $50,000 plus on master plans" is a bit shortsighted.
My interpretation of this comment is that she recommends using town staff to handle the research and creation of master plans and other planning documents in order to save money. This sort of statement has good political traction, but if you look at this issue more closely, it really does not save money, actually it can be more costly from many perspectives. I can speak from experience on this matter. In addition, I really don't think this comment was made with much thought nor research.
First, if you rely on existing staff levels to get these plans done,you would have to push aside routine, day-to-day activities. From the planning and engineering perspective, this would have an impact on development work as well as infrastructure work. This means that the development schedule for residential subdivision plans, commercial plans or anything else would have to be pushed back, since town staff would be needed to compile data and prepare reports. This would likely drive economic developers to other municipalities who have more timely review and approval schedules. This could put the availability of essential services to citizens at risk, such as water and sewer projects.
Second, if you are not willing to push aside routine development and other work, then you would have to hire additional town staff. There is no way around that! There are costs involved with that as well. Not only is there the need to establish a competitive salary to get qualified personnel, but there are benefit costs (an additional 30% over salary), recruitment costs as well as general office expenses. You incur some or all of these costs whether it is a permanent or temporary employee. In addition, once this work dries up, you may have to lay off employees. This could be a negative hit to the town’s reputation as a stable employer. If we get the reputation for being an unstable work environment then no solid job candidates will ever want to work here.
Third, the time involved in putting together these plans is significant for a quality report. These are some approximate consultant times, provided by town staff, for some these previously prepared plans:
Beyond the Green (P&R master plan)- 3 consultants over 9-10 months
Vision Holly Springs- 5 consultants over 736 hours
Bicycle Transportation Plan- 500 hours
Holly Springs Comprehensive Transportation Plan- 800 hours
In addition, if town staff had to research, create and publish these plans, the hours needed would be much greater. Consultants are normally experts in these very specific fields and have a lot of pre- established plan formats as well as research and experience to rely on, which saves a lot of time. The product quality a town can expect would be better from an expert consultant as well. Town staff, although very knowledgeable, may not have the detailed technical expertise for some projects. Staff engineers, planners and parks staff are more like "generalists". After all, would you go to a general practitioner for a heart ailment? Of course not, you would go to a cardiologist!
As I have stated a number of times in the past, when you hear shocking or sensational comments from a candidate, the best thing you can do is research and verify to get the truth. This was my personal interpretation and opinion related to this comment. This is my opinion based on the information I gleaned over my 12 years on the town council. I did also contact a number of town staff members in order to get these consultant hours for each plan. It is healthy to raise issues to help improve the services that the town offers, but raising issues to alarm or create suspicion, without valid research or data, is not beneficial to the citizens of a town.
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