Baltimore’s spending board ramped up its payments to an international consulting firm Wednesday by more than $1 million, extending its contract an additional six months despite skepticism raised by two members that the firm’s contributions may not justify the cost.
Ernst & Young, a recurrent contractor for Baltimore, has been under agreement for more than a year to consult on an effort to set goals, manage, and track progress for a broad slate of priorities laid out by Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration.
But City Council President Nick Mosby and Comptroller Bill Henry, the only representatives on the five-member Board of Estimates who aren’t appointed by the mayor, questioned the transparency of the city’s contract and suggested that the city might be able to accomplish the same work in-house, without outsourcing to an expensive consulting firm.
The board approved the contract 3-1, with Scott, City Solicitor Jim Shea and public works Director Jason Mitchell voting in favor. Mosby voted against the contract extension, while Henry abstained.
The vote follows a board meeting two weeks ago in which Mosby and Henry sought more information on the accomplishments of Ernst & Young under its contract. The comptroller requested more information from the Mayor’s Office detailing the firm’s work, and the City Council president deferred a final board decision to this week.
Baltimore has paid Ernst & Young $750,000 since last August for consulting on a newly created city entity called the Transformation Management Office, which will be tasked with providing accountability and measuring progress of agency goals under the Mayor’s Action Plan. That list of more than 180 Scott administration targets for public safety, cleaner communities, neighborhood development and other “pillars” is currently being tracked through a dashboard on the city’s website.
“When this contract originally came to the board, I expressed concern about — I didn’t think enough meat was there to deliver on goals,” Mosby said during the board discussion two weeks ago. The council president noted that the city’s bill to Ernst & Young has ballooned from $600,000 to $1.7 million with the latest extension “and we do not necessarily know where the end in sight is.”
Assistant City Administrator Ariel Giles told the board that Ernst & Young has helped with a wide range of steps in the city’s approach to managing the mayor’s priorities, providing technical assistance, training agency-level leaders, providing project expertise and helping to facilitate collaboration between agencies. The consulting firm has also provided needed extra manpower, Giles said.
Giles told the board that there is “a tremendous need” for streamlining city systems and bolstering reporting on agency performance. “When I first came on, we were trying to track actions through Excel sheets and emails. Emails and Excel sheets are not processes and systems,” he said.
The most recent iteration of the contract lapsed in mid-August, Giles said, and Ernst & Young has not provided any work since that time. Some payment in the contract extension will cover work the firm already performed, Giles said.
Henry said he supports efforts to increase agency performance, but questioned whether a pricey consulting contract was the best way to get there. Alternatively, the city might have better allocated resources by paying Ernst & Young for expertise, but hiring on more affordable temporary employees to supplement manpower, the comptroller suggested.
But “the past is now the past” and it may be too late to reverse course, Henry said.
“I’m not sure that we went on the right path with our approach to E.Y., but I also feel that I share some measure of blame for that for not more clearly articulating my concerns earlier to the administration,” Henry said.
The contract extension breaks the more than $1 million fee into two categories: $600,000 for “additional work performed,” and another $350,000 for the development of software that would host agency performance plans and allow for more transparency in the progress of agencies towards their goals.
The extension covers the second of three phases in Ernst & Young’s work, Giles said. The spending board approved a six-month extension earlier this year, and Giles said the administration anticipates returning for approval on a final contract phase later.
