Going rate for a consultant

Readers of this blog probably noted that I have been inviting exactly the kind of "performance audit" that the Mayor and the City Council have been talking about recently. Bring it on, please. Here's why: Omaha did just that, and we look pretty good in Omaha's study. The City of Omaha spent $275,000 to hire Matrix Consulting Group, a firm that specializes in such studies. The results hit the Omaha World Herald beginning on Monday, and the full report is available on their web site. It's an interesting read, and an example of what we could expect in such a study

Matrix concluded that the Omaha Police Department should be slightly downsized, and should replace 35 police officers with a smaller number (21) of civilian "Community Service Officers". These CSO's would handle minor incidents not requiring a police officer with full arrest authority, at a cost about 75% of that of a sworn police officer. The paraprofessional employees the consultant recommends are essentially the same as the Lincoln Police Department's Public Service Officers and Police Service Specialists, who collectively handled 12,039 of our 139,854 police calls-for-service last year. They'd be doing even more, but our non-sworn support staff has not fared well at budget time for many years.

One of our City Council members emailed me after reading some of the news stories about the Omaha study. He wanted to know how Lincoln's police staffing would compare to a "revised" Omaha Police Department, if the consultant's recommendations were implemented. It took me about a New York minute to respond:

We'd need to add 117 police officers to our staff of 316 officers in order to be at the same size per capita as Omaha after the proposed reduction. You'd also need to add 23 civilian support positions. That would be around $9.5 million per year, every year, for direct costs alone.

The comparative data on Lincoln/Omaha staffing is on page 75 of the technical appendices in the consultant's report. It demonstrates quite clearly how small the Lincoln Police Department is in comparison to the rest of the cities. This isn't an example of cherry-picking: we're the smallest police department per capita in the State, 177th smallest of the 192 in Nebraska and the surrounding states (between Hays, Kansas and Lee's Summit, Missouri, and the only city of 200,000 in the bottom half). Don't take my word, do your own research.

As we were discussing the Omaha study, one of my veteran coworkers, Capt. Jim Thoms, noted that the consultant's report is comprised of lots of the same kind of comparative data that I compile every year and supply to many other police departments, gratis. He suggested that he and I could split a Thermos of coffee and produce a pretty good efficiency study with much of the same information for a little less than $275,000.