County has a free lunch on the menu, but how nourishing?

Sometimes an idea is so good that you pray it could work but the odds tell you it’s a bad bet.

Such is a plan from Danielle Cohen Higgins in a Miami-Dade committee this week to hire management or financial consultants to find ways to grow county revenues, cut expenses, and increase financial efficiencies and pay them from what they save.

That would be a free lunch: the county gets the savings at no extra fee.

It sounds like hiring lawyers who get a percentage of what they win in court – if they don’t win, they don’t get paid. But there’s a lot of difference. 

In court the lawyer and the client want the same thing: the biggest financial return. But in county hall, a saving or revenue or efficiency that a consultant finds may come face to face with aims totally unrelated to finances.

Consultants, therefore, would be seeking economic efficiency in an economically inefficient structure.

The county doesn’t strive to spend the least or be paid the most. Business has a profit motive, but the county starts with public service, and after election day saving taxpayers’ money ranks far down on the list of goals.

Part of the county’s unstated aim is to aid the less fortunate. It’s fine to save money, but only after some groups get taken care of, even if doing so costs taxpayers more. Call it diversity, equity and inclusion or whatever, Miami-Dade’s government has an unwritten aim to advance the backwatered among us.

A spat over buying office supplies, for example, boiled down to making sure contracts went to small businesses within the county. Commissioners bristled when they learned that one major vendor was in Broward County and wasn’t small. Its prices were lower and service better, but it didn’t meet the commission’s aims in picking a contract winner.

Baked into billions of dollars in contract procurements is a long list of groups that get bidding breaks, some 5%, some 10%, some 15%, based on where bidders are located, whether they are owned by military veterans, women, minority groups, persons with physical disabilities, small businesses and more.

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava in 2023 ordered department heads to follow more than 40 purchasing and contracts preferences that don’t mention either price or quality.

A consultant who points out savings by eliminating preferences is not going to save a dime because preferences are not ordered by the departments that Commissioner Cohen Higgins wants a consultant to examine but by the mayor and commissioners.

And without saving or earning a dime, finding a qualified consulting firm would be nearly impossible unless the consultant was an Elon Musk whose aims weren’t just saving taxpayers’ money.

Consultants would get only 60 days to dig into 25 departments and find inefficiencies, savings and revenues. That would either require a large paid staff or produce a slipshod report. It’s a tremendous challenge surrounded by many questions.

First, even if a consultant found valid savings or earnings, would commissioners do anything? We know, for example, that the water and sewer department could charge more, but no commission would raise rates to put more money in the bank.

The airport, seaport and the water and sewer departments are all self-funding and don’t affect county general funds. Would they be part of an efficiency study? If so, would added water and sewer earnings or seaport fees, for example, benefit the consultant?

Suppose a study found valid savings that commissioners then dismissed. Would the consultant be entitled to a share of savings that due to commission inaction for political or social reasons are never made? Would that possibility be spelled out in a consulting contract?

Would worker efficiency be studied? In a unionized county, that would open a huge can of worms. So would an evaluation of pay and benefits, which by standards of private enterprise seem generous.

How much freedom would a consultant get? A consultant who pointed out fat that laws and rules larded into the county would not get very far toward earning a fee based on savings. 

So, just what would be fair game? The legislation aims to look at departments. That would leave out commissioners’ own offices, their employees, and several offices that fall under the commission itself.

Then come five realms that have just been yanked out from central county control, including elections, the clerk’s office, the huge sheriff’s department, the tax collector and the property appraiser. Would efficiency in those sectors be examined?

A good consultant surely could find lots of county savings according to private enterprise standards. Inefficiencies are built in, because the aims of business and government differ in both theory and practice. Government taxes us to achieve aims that private enterprise cannot, so we can’t hold government to the same standards that we hold a business.

Examining county economic efficiency is wise, but ultimately many inefficiencies are due to laws and policy, not inefficient administrators or workers.

If Commissioner Cohen Higgins’ legislation passes, it will be interesting how many qualified consultants apply to get all or most of their fees from savings that the county actually enacts in a bountiful free lunch.