By Kristen Shane

A consultancy company the Municipality of Kincardine paid more than $125,000 to help audit its capital assets is asking for at least $19,000 more for unauthorized work.

Two years ago, council agreed to hire Urban Environmental Management Inc. of the Toronto area to help the municipality assess the value of all its tangible assets such as roads, sewers, computers and snowplows. Enforcement of the new accounting rules kicks in at the end of this year. The company has billed Kincardine about $126,000 for work it did between mid 2007 to early 2008.

But the project has been bigger and more complex than the municipality expected. The consultant ran into unforeseen problems that meant it had to go looking for missing data and account for more infrastructure than it had anticipated. It went ahead and did the work that needed to be done so the municipality could meet its deadline, but the company didn’t tell Kincardine about all the extra costs until this July.

That’s when the company sent a letter asking for almost $35,500 more. Municipal staff have negotiated with the consultant to whittle that amount down to slightly less than $19,000.

But that was still too much for several councillors to stomach last week.

“I think we shouldn’t give this. I think that’s their own cost,” said councillor Gordon Campbell.

“They signed the contract for X amount of dollars. They knew what the work was…I’m sorry, but if you want to live out of the box then you have to come to us. Now they’re the jack-in-the-box,” said councillor Randy Roppel.

Councillor Ron Hewitt wondered why company officials didn’t just ask for council’s okay to do the extra work before they did it.

“Council sits three times a month. Somebody could have brought a report to us,” he said.

Chief administrative officer John deRosenroll said municipal staff told that to company officials when they spoke about the situation during a conference call last month.

Nevertheless, he reminded council that the clock is ticking on the project deadline. “This would be absolutely critical to us if we had a separation with our consultant at this time,” he said.

Treasurer Brenda French added: “I would certainly have never recommended to council that they get paid for the whole thing. But I believe there is value in the work that they did.”

At the time, in-house staff couldn’t do what the consultants did, she said.

“We’re between a rock and a hard place here,” said councillor Marsha Leggett.

With only five of nine councillors present at the meeting, she suggested deferring a decision until tonight’s meeting when a fuller council could give the issue more thought. The rest of council agreed.