Back when some folks thought it was a good thing to make government leaner (and meaner… much meaner)… now we end up spending local dollars to pay not so local workers (Davey) and corporations (like the stinky Waste Management contract) for work that local people could and should be doing.

Indeed we might, and I mean might/maybe/perhaps or perhaps not, pay a premium to employ local folks to perform skilled and semi skilled city labor, it’s different in these times and means so much more to us now. But since those people and their work has now been outsourced and the city no longer has the skilled employees or the resources, it seems that we have no choice but to go elsewhere for labor and ship those dollars out of the region.

Just like those who said 9/11 and the economic meltdown of this new century couldn’t have been predicted, who could have predicted that if we downsized government, got rid of local workers who made a decent wage and who put that money back into the local economy, that we would end up flying in folks from New Hampshire to GIS our trees or buying expensive software (Trakit) from a California company instead of software from a company (BS&A) in Okemos MI?

For sure, not me!

The flaw in the process here is that when you bid something like this out locally, it’s not likely that anyone’s going to already going to have multiple sets of the tested equipment kit that Dave describes in the OP, plus a ready action plan and track record for doing projects exactly like one. That’s why consultants get this sort of job.

There should probably be an intermediate step in the purchase process that is not “in-house” and is not “contract out”, it is “can we develop this capability here in a reasonable time frame?” Maybe there already is something like that.

The question becomes: Do you want local workers and how much of a premium are you willing to pay for that? For now it seems that flying in workers and putting them up in hotel rooms for extended periods of time is less expensive than having locals do the job.

Where is it written that I’m supposed to “Be Generous” to a bureaucracy that wastes our money at every turn.

Maybe I’ll feel more generous when there’s some accountability at 100 N Fifth Avenue.

The “City Forester” as an actual city position of any consequence is an urban myth since the retirement of Paul Bairley.

Recall that you are supposed to “Be Generous.” But then again, I have learned something from this: there is a lot of spite in Ann Arbor. Maybe a gallon of spite per tree?

The city asks much of volunteers for appropriate tasks. (In that vein, have we set the example we ask of others?) In contrast, the survey work is professional in nature, and those who are trained to do it deserve to be paid for their knowledge and skill.

I suspect that the city forester is still catching up on the backlog of tree maintenance needs that resulted from the necessary attention given to the dead and dying ash trees in recent years and doesn’t have the eight person-months available in her schedule.

Contempt won’t improve anything about this situation (or any other.)

Link to Woody Plants

There’s 160 species in the area, and it takes a whole semester (including walks through bogs) to learn how to accurately identify them all.

And that report will probably end up on a shelf where many other consultant studies end up in city hall.

Other than the gee whiz factor of being able to look at a “cool data set” and google map of street trees online this is an exercise in bureaucratic waste… not to mention outsourcing work that could be done by city staff.

At its root (get it?) this is little more than part of Roger Frasers budgetary shell game.