Column: City of Wausau apparently violated its own procurement policy for years

Wausau’s Independent: By Tom Kilian for Wausau Pilot & Review

It turns out that the City of Wausau has apparently been violating its own procurement policy for years. This revelation came to light at Tuesday’s Finance Committee meeting.

The current policy, which starts on page 7 of this PDF, states that the City Attorney shall approve the contracts as to form. Per statements at Tuesday’s meeting, in many cases, this contract approval has not been occurring.

The procurement policy also states, “Contracts shall be signed by the Mayor and counter-signed by the City Clerk, City Finance Director and City Attorney.” Evidently, the counter-signatures from the City Finance Director and City Attorney for contracts are not always occurring either. To compound this problem, it is my understanding that no one at City Hall really knows what that particular policy language was intended to mean or refer to – in terms of specific contracts – when that language was originally crafted.

To be clear, government procurement policy is a big deal and serious.

At Tuesday’s meeting, the City Attorney said that she was the one who initiated this procurement policy conversation because it has made her “nervous for many years” that the policy states that the City Attorney shall approve every contract as to form, but that she did not know if she “sees 10 percent of the contracts that come into the City” or “who is signing them.”

I commend the City Attorney for voluntarily bringing this problem up, and for speaking about it publicly with candor. It is unclear why this issue had not come out publicly at an earlier date.

At one point during Tuesday’s meeting, the Finance Director disclosed that the Finance Director and City Attorney were on the signature plate for construction projects, but not for other contracts, so they were not signing those other contracts. That characterization made it sound like a simple logistical challenge, rather than an omission in regard to the current procurement policy as written. At around this same time in the meeting, the Finance Director also conveyed that the new procurement language proposed was intended to be a “correction” or to put things “in accordance with what the practice is.”

First, let me restate that last sentiment in a different way: portions of the City’s procurement policy were not being followed for years and some of the proposed updated language would codify those types of past policy omissions as the new, acceptable law of the land.

Second, the question is begged: if the current procurement policy outlined that counter-signatures from the Finance Director and City Attorney were required on contracts, and that same policy also laid out that the City Attorney was to approve contracts as to form, then why were there contracts whose signature plate did not accommodate the required counter-signatures? Odd stuff.

If the answer is that some of the contracts and their formats were statutorily prescribed and did not include a place for the required counter-signatures, then staff could have gone back to committee and council in order to make the necessary adjustments to the procurement policy. Obviously, that did not happen. At least, not until now, after years of not following the official City procurement policy as written.

At Tuesday’s meeting, it was the two new alders who sit on the Finance Committee – through questions and comments – that strove to provide the City with more protection when it came to contract signatures and counter-signatures. Those two new alders are the new District 3 Alder, Terry Kilian (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is my mom) and the new District 9 Alder, Vicki Tierney.

To his credit, the committee chair was even-handed and seemed to facilitate civil dialogue among committee members who disagreed. And there was disagreement.

Two other alders on the committee who have years of combined experience between them disagreed with the notion of leaving language in the procurement policy that would explicitly require counter-signatures from the City Finance Director and City Attorney.

One of those alders made two claims: that all of the basic contracts are approved by the City Attorney, and that the City Attorney is the repository of those contracts. As you can see on the public access video, the City Attorney quickly indicated that both of those claims were incorrect.

The other of those two alders thought that leaving in the language requiring counter-signatures from the Finance Director and City Attorney in the procurement policy (language that was proposed to be stricken) would be “redundant” because other sentences in the policy stated that the “City Finance Director shall certify that funds have been provided by the Council to pay” and that the “City Attorney shall approve the contract as to form.”

If we use the latter sentence in the policy about City Attorney approval of the contract, we can see that leaving in the language requiring a counter-signature is, in fact, not redundant. The City Attorney could “approve” a contract via a variety of written methods, and those written approvals, without more explicit language included in the policy, may or may not include a counter-signature for approval. The only way to ensure a counter-signature is required for contract approval is by including explicit language that requires it.

I encourage all citizens to review the current procurement policy language linked to above in combination with the public access video of the July 23 City Finance Committee that is embedded below this column in order to note these things for themselves.

So, if the City has not been following the current procurement policy for years, in terms of counter-signatures and approval of contracts, on how many City contracts was the policy not followed? That seems like a good question. A relevant citizen open records request to the City of Wausau may be able to identify some of those contracts.

The City’s procurement policy is the most recent arena in which proper process was not followed at City Hall. In recent months, more have existed, like the Thomas Street RFP debacle, among others. In a prior column, I referenced the 2014 Wausau Daily Herald editorial piece on “Troubled governance, waste and deception” related to local government. It is important to note that a portion of that editorial piece criticized the Tipple Administration for not only the problems, but its “closed-door approach” to addressing those problems. It makes clear that a city leader must address concerns and reassure critics in “a visible, transparent way.”

I believe that most Wausonians do not expect or desire a public castigation of individual city staff members, but they do desire transparency and accountability from the government when it comes to the people’s affairs. In fact, they deserve them.

Wausau’s Independent is a weekly opinion column by former Wausau Alder Tom Kilian, a founding member of the grassroots environmental group Citizens for a Clean Wausau. Views expressed here are independent of this newspaper and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wausau Pilot. To submit an idea for a future column, email [email protected] or mail to 500 N. Third St. Suite 208-8, Wausau, Wis. 54403.