I hear about millions of dollars, but nothing seems to get done.

First, cities do spend a lot of money - your money.  The types of things that seem to cost the most are those that are labor intensive.  Many cities basically run a service business.  The average city budget is about 75% labor.  As you already know, labor is expensive.  The specialties in city government can be expensive as well.  For instance, professional police, fire and engineering services are expensive, but do you really want non-professionals doing this important work?  Also, since all cities want excellent services, they actually compete with each other for the limited skills and abilities. 

Therefore, it is increasingly challenging to provide you with excellent services (which we all want to do) and keep the costs down.  We do work at it.  We look for efficiencies, work to control costs and only raise your taxes as a last resort, but running a city is an expensive proposition.

Secondly, there are many laws and regulations which do make it more expensive to do things for a city than for other businesses.  For example, whenever public money is used on a capital project, we must pay state-wide prevailing wages (union scale) even if we could find qualified persons who are willing to work for less.  Another example is that we must require either insurance, a bond and a lot of paperwork at the end of a project to make sure no rules were broken by the contractors we use.  This adds to the cost because the contractors have to build these additional costs into their bids.

Yes, we are required to bid out public projects, but that is not always the most effective way to accomplish something.  (it is a long story).

Those who work in certain industries are prohibited by state law from striking, but the law also provides for "binding arbitration" to settle labor disputes.  That means that if the parties can't agree, an arbitrator who hears both sides makes the decision.  This can be good, or it can be bad.  It can often be expensive and result in expensive consequences.

So you see, you may be able to find a less expensive way, but so could we.  But in the interest of public policy, we have a lot of "red tape" that drive up the costs.

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