Spending $1.3 million without prior approval? Kansas City Council should set limits for the city manager
Kansas City is edging closer to a reasonable policy on spending by city officials without specific prior approval by members of the City Council.
Under current city ordinances, City Manager Troy Schulte and a handful of others can sign construction contracts worth up to $1.3 million without specific prior approval. While city staff needs flexibility to manage a sprawling community, $1.3 million is excessive.
Other cities set the bar much lower. Kansas City should emulate them.
Kansas City Councilman Quinton Lucas and five colleagues have introduced an ordinance that lowers the limits. Under their plan, Schulte and staff could authorize construction contracts up to $750,000 without council approval. Service contracts would be capped at $50,000.
Under his original plan, Lucas wanted to limit contracts for design services, goods, materials and equipment to $250,000. This week, though, he said he’ll raise that lid to $750,000.
Those caps may still be too high. Allowing city staff to spend $750,000 on goods and supplies without final council review seems risky, and that would exceed the $400,000 cap in the current ordinance.
But the $50,000 limit on service contracts is reasonable. It might not have stopped Schulte from spending $40,000 to study a downtown baseball stadium, but it would impose a new limit on the amount consultants can earn without prior approval from elected officials.
The Lucas ordinance also includes important safeguards to make sure the public plays a role in major spending decisions.
It allows city officials to procure single-source contracts, for example, but requires a statement in writing explaining the decision to skip bids. Acceptable explanations include an emergency and a single source for the product.
Most importantly, the ordinance would require a quarterly report to the City Council detailing contracts signed for amounts under the $750,000 and $50,0000 caps. That means the city manager would have had to tell the council about the baseball stadium contract, but would not have needed approval to pursue it.
Such a requirement brings needed transparency to city contracts. Regular readers may be sensing our theme: The public has a right to know how much money is being spent in the taxpayers’ name, and why.
In fact, quarterly reports are not enough. The city manager could easily publish a monthly list of all city contracts and purchases, with amounts and purposes attached. The city should publish the information online in a searchable database and provide a summary to the City Council.
This summer’s long argument over the contract to design and build a new airport terminal taught everyone important lessons about transparency and openness when public money is spent. While the airport procurement process wasn’t perfect, it eventually yielded a plan for KCI voters could support.
That’s because what began as a secret process eventually became far more open at the end. Kansas Citians are more than willing to fairly consider projects and proposals from 12th and Oak, but they want the facts first.
The Lucas ordinance, which may be heard by a committee Thursday, is a needed step in that direction. The council can make it better, and should then pass it into law.
This story was originally published December 13, 2017 at 1:16 PM with the headline "Spending $1.3 million without prior approval? Kansas City Council should set limits for the city manager."