Core review costs in other cities... - confluence, by andrew kurjata

Posted on 30 April 2012

Prince George council just signed a contract to pay a consulting company $313,720 to conduct a core services review. With a population of 80,000 (somewhere between the “actual” population and the “population served”), this amounts to roughly $3.90 per person. How does that compare to other cities that have done a core review. Here’s a rough round-up. Populations are roughly based on what I find from census and the cities.

City

Population

Core review cost

Core review cost per person

Toronto

2,615,060

$1,000,000 (no source, widely cited)

$0.38

Mission

36,426

$100,000 [or less] (source)

$2.74

Penticton

32,877

$70,000 (source)

$2.13

Regina

193,100

$298,947 (source)

$1.55

I know White Rock also did one, and Oliver is about to have one, but I couldn’t find any primary sources talking about cost.
It’s also worth pointing out as Chris Leboe does that “I suppose you need to compare the scopes of work before you can compare fairly… Population alone might not be fair.” This is true. Maybe this core review will be much more in-depth and get more value per dollar than any of the others. But it’s worth having this benchmark to make comparisons.
As always, if you have better numbers or more accurate comparisons to be making, feel free to chime in. This is just a rough document done in my spare time, nothing “official”.

Filed under: Prince George