New Go Public law exposes NY’s army of 24-karat consultants

By SHERRY HALBROOK
The state’s new Contract Disclosure Law that PEF’s Go Public campaign pushed through last year is starting to pry the lid off a billion-dollar strongbox of what may be some very dirty little secrets.

It reveals some state agencies are paying as much as half a million dollars per consultant employee annually.

The state Department of Agriculture and Markets paid an average of $516,125 each for its 40 private consultants last year. That average will climb to $574,914 in the fiscal year that starts April 1.

The state Health Department is only paying $439,768 per consultant in FY 2007-08. But it’s paying that rate per person for 500 people.

In fact, per-consultant annual pay will average above $170,000 at more than a dozen state agencies in the new fiscal year.

“This isn’t the NFL or major league baseball. This is state government,” said PEF President Ken Brynien. “What are these consultants doing to earn these gold-plated pay checks? New York doesn’t pay its own employees on that scale and they have devoted their careers to serving the taxpayers.

“For years, PEF has been struggling to pull the lid of secrecy off of these contracts, because every glimpse we got showed consultants were charging millions of dollars for work state employees could do just as well for far less money,” Brynien said. “We’ve had to investigate it one contract at a time, using the state Freedom of Information Law. Sometimes we’ve had to sue to enforce the public’s right to know.

“Now, for the first time, the state has had to reveal, across-the-board, how many contract employees work for it and how much it pays for them,” Brynien said.

It’s a whole new section in the governor’s Executive Budget that shows the state is spending a total of $911 million on contracts in FY 2006-07 that provide 7,546 consultant employees. The total tab will climb to $924 million in FY 2007-08.

However, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who has just taken office, would cut the number of consultants to 7,278.

“That’s not a huge reduction, but it is a good start,” said PEF Director of Civil Service Enforcement Tom Cetrino. “In many cases, the state is locked into multi-year contracts with escalators that raise the costs every year. The governor can’t eliminate those contracts until they expire or come up for renewal.”

“We believe the governor is serious about following through on his campaign promise to reduce the state’s reliance on costly private consultants and, instead, rely on qualified and less expensive public employees,” Brynien said.

“It’s clear from the new budget proposals and the level of information they provide for the first time about the numbers of consultants and contract employees,” Cetrino said, “that PEF’s campaign is having a major effect on shifting the state from dependence on consultants to rebuilding the state work force.”

“The best way to ensure the state is permanently weaned from its dependence on consultants is to get our final Go Public bill passed and signed into law,” Brynien said. “The Cost-Benefit Analysis Bill would force state agencies to find out if it would cost less to have state employees do a job, before handing it off to private consultants.”

The Communicator March 2007

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Oops! The February issue mistakenly identified member Sue Jeffords as retired; incorrectly referred to PEF Division 239 as Division 283; and omitted that retired thoroughbred C.L. Rib ran 93 races and hit the tote board 51 times.

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