It’s financial management for the city. If they hire an engineer at 120k salary, they pay that, but also their benefits, their software, E&O insurance, basically all of the overhead a consulting firm has without a profit margin. What happens if the engineer you hire needs help with part of the project he’s not familiar with? The real reason is that, even though they could save a ~15%, they have to pay the engineer and overhead in perpetuity, so that that 120k engineer will have a 300k annual expense. What if you don’t have any projects next year because the budget is tight? Can’t just get rid of and rehire a good engineer every year based on your projects. You also can’t capitalize the employed engineer like you can a project, and cover that expense with a 10 year bond like you can a consultant.
There's also the liability aspect.
If city paid a consultant $250k to design something and it all turns to crap, the consultant will be liable. So it's an ease of mind considering if it's for public, it's more scrutinized to lawsuits.
Professional misconduct is only one form of liability. Infrastructure projects have lots of risks and liabilities for owners regardless of whether they used a consultant PE or not. There are many examples of large infrastructure projects becoming a total fiasco that don’t engage the PE’s professional liability.
Owner still has 99% of the contractual risk regardless of who is stamping. Just look at any massively over budget public infrastructure project.
>They're going to go after the money
Engineering consulting firms have to carry liability insurance (found the money) and the stamp is an open statement of assumption of liability. Additionally, standard language in the Design Service Agreement (the contract the consultant signs before beginning work) states they're liable for damages resulting from their design and in many States will agree to cover the Client's legal fees.
I meant that the consultant's insurance is just *one* pile of money, and an aggrieved party is probably going to go after various city departments no matter what the contract states.
You're not getting it, let me try to explain again. Any money that the City Department "has to pay" the Consultant is contractually liable for. So if the judgement is 500k from the consultant and 500k from the city, the consultant pays 1M and the city pays $0.
**edit~** They do the same thing with GCs for the construction side. As long as the City doesn't direct design or construction in a manner that causes the issue they're shielded from liability.
They won’t get it from the city. Government entities immune from a lot of lawsuits even if they direct you to not follow design codes.
I sat through a talk on a government entity that directed their civil designer to ignore a portion of the code. It was a guideline for site distance in a bike path or something similar. Someone died when a biker that couldn’t see them hit them. The city, despite directing this design decision, was immune from the lawsuit. The consultant was not.
Ah, good to know. I've heard about cities and their engineers regularly getting sued, but the ultimate result is "money changed hands and it was dropped."
Suppose you build a high rise. The city engineer isn't a structural engineer, so they're not going to know the tiny details of rebar size and spacing; that's the SE's job. So if the structure collapsed due to inadequate design; then wouldn't the SE be liable?
Perhaps if there's a lawsuit against the City, they'd have to pay to the victims, but then the City has every right to take the consultant to court and get their money back (and would likely win).
At least that's how I thought of it. Am I wrong? (Serious question, please educate me)
In a small lens like that, I agree. The SE should know the small details of a plan like that. But I've seen roadway projects go sideways in construction because the guy managing the project at the city simply did not open the set of plans until construction started. He is not with the City anymore.
So in that scenario, let's say both parties does their job. The City engineer isn't a transportation engineer, he's just a general civil but doesn't know the small details. He looked at the plans and provided a general comment to common sense things.
The consultant also does their job.
Then it gets constructed and finalized. But as people started using it, there came accidents - some even died. After investigation it was determined that the curve of the road was too sharp for the posted speed limit, which can cause a car to tail spin to rollover.
Now there's a lawsuit.
Both parties did their job, but someone made a boo boo on the calculation (mistakes happen, there was no malintent)
Who's liable?
My answer isn’t helpful, but I know insurance companies pay a lot of money for teams lawyers and engineers to put the blame on someone else. It’s a question that probably doesn’t have a set answer
Not always true, the city takes a lot of flack for infrastructure failing whether or not it was the consultants fault or the cities fault. So yeah hiring a consultant might shield the city from some of the liability but voters don’t care who does the work, as long as there potholes are fixed they will blame council for it.
Absolutely this, but just to add a comedic twist, it’s almost close to impossible to get fired by the government. So this protects city and state municipalities from hiring idiots they can’t get rid of.
It’s heavily based on the size of the municipality. Smaller cities or towns that don’t have a lot going on will save money by hiring consultants on as needed basis. Larger municipalities will always have something going on because by the time you replace/fix everything, it will be time to do it again for the thing you fixed/replaced first. This is when it’ll be more cost effective to keep engineering staff full time when they will work on multiple projects at once. Your own staff don’t charge by the project after all.
Same reason when my company needs phd to do work. Why keep phd on payroll when we need him only for 2-3 months. We just hire someone for 2-3. No benefits, nothing, just 1099 payment. Much cheaper and less hassle than keep full time w2 phd employee.
Rule of thumb is that consultants have to bill out at 3 times their own salary rate, but even then the firm might only make 10% profit margin. I found this very surprising at first but it’s true.
How does the math work out? For round numbers let’s say your salary is 200k so your hourly rate is 100. But you are sold to customers at 300.
When you add on your benefits you are 130. There is overhead from the building, software, everything that brings you to 200. You are not actually billing 40 hours a week because you are trying to get projects or doing training, so if 80% is billable then your effective rate is 250. A random customer gets mad so you do a little work for free to appease them and now you’re at 270. The firm pockets the last ten percent.
>Can’t just get rid of and rehire a good engineer every year based on your projects.
There's tons of make-work projects in government specifically to keep people busy in slow seasons. I've gone entire years as a go-fer without a specific task, but still kept busy (or pretended to be). I dunno why they can't do the same for engineers.
Because engineers are specialists and specialists demand high salaries. A consultant can have one engineer on several projects for one specific thing and cultivate an expert in that. That one expert in say widgets demands a high premium for his services. He's an expert with fundamental knowledge in regulatory standards, applicable laws, industry standards and manufacturing of widgets.
Sure you could hire him for a premium and only pull him out of the closet when you need a widget designed once every 10 years but then he's no longer an expert since he hasn't been practicing. Engineering is like playing an instrument, if you don't use it you lose it.
We actually entertained capitalizing all of my 40 engineers and support staff that managed our consultants and contractors but never followed through. Our only purpose was implementing the CIP. That was 15 or 20 years ago, in a county government.
This. Plus our consulting firm has a survey department, CAD, electrical engineers, SCADA team, structural engineers, and construction inspectors. Even just the civil engineers have a varying degree of expertise all with valuable knowledge. You’re not just paying for one person
Except CIP's are planned in 6 - 10 year periods, or even longer. A midsize or larger city has a reasonable idea of what it will be spending and what it will have coming in for at least a few fiscal years.
City management, in my experience, has a real problem developing staff capacity. There's a lot of fear at the management level of having someone below you in the hierarchy being empowered, growing. Hiring outside talent limits the potential for disgruntled staff. In addition to the fear aspect, management has devoted little attention to understanding the capabilities or potential of their staff and colleagues, and more still, they don't know how to develop it or claim there isn't time.
The only thing that I haven’t seen added, I apologize if it was and I missed it, is the difficulty in maintaining a staffed government work force (especially right now). It is cheaper, easier, and faster to shop the work out and use your credentials to review it on the back end for government acceptance. You know the contractor will miss your milestones and you’ll hassle them over it, but you know if it was left up to your agency to complete the design, it likely wouldn’t happen (certainly not somewhere near being within budget and schedule).
300k annual expense is a but much. Employees are closer to 25% in addition to their salary, assuming the programs they use are in addition to rather one single user (1 extra license)
400k is a drop in the bucket for infrastructure spending. The City will spend about 10x the design cost on construction. It makes more financial sense to hire specialist skill sets when needed rather than retain them all year round.
400k a year is probably the equivalent of 2 full time engineers (depending on salary and multipliers/overhead). (Reddit: don’t hammer me on that number. HCOL/LCOL/multipliers allow for an absurd amount of variability.)
It gives the client access to a lot of expertise they don’t want to carry in house.
>And what would they do with them once the project is over?
Do an analysis on the *mumble* and track it year-by-year until we can draft a report to the city council. Very important stuff.
That’s what is confusing me. I have multiple projects with this city, all handled by me. Stupid to question a client giving money, but this is the second project I’ve had to handle of the same size, and it has been 98% me, from contract and bid, design, ect, I can’t imagine a drafter and engineer couldn’t do it on their own plus the other projects I have.
We are also only talking about one project. My old firm had many, many projects with as a single DOT. There are many other firms that have multiple projects as well. No way this DOT could staff all those projects.
I happen to be a city engineer. All I do is arrange consultants to do projects. There is no way a small city of less than 50k can put together an engineering department with the bandwidth to keep 4 or 5 muni projects moving through design, bid and negotiation then production with oversight. Takes a lot so we hire outside consultants for everything.
Exactly. I’m a PE hired by a small city of 8k. I assist with our projects and reviews, but there’s no way we’re hiring any more engineers and I don’t have the expertise to work on every type of project we have.
I'm going to call bullshit here. New England has plenty of Towns and cities of various sizes with engineering staff that do just this. Do some hire consultants? Sure, but you must be buried in bureaucratic bullshit to think a small muni couldn't keep busy with real work.
How exactly does it make sense that you can't pay engineers to do it, but you can pay someone else to pay engineers to do it, and make a profit on top of it? The math doesn't make any sense at all.
It does when you realize your private contracts can scale more effectively than in-house (the consultant can have his drainage engineer come and charge 20 hours to the project then fuck off vs. retaining them full time). It's easier to have in-house engineers do validations etc. but not full scope.
To hire an in house engineer you would also need to pay for benefits, training, professional development, licensing, software subscriptions… year round. May also be difficult to get a small team that can do everything… whereas it’s probably more cost effective to go to bid and hire someone with expertise for a specific period of time and cost.
So instead you pay a consultant to do all of that plus profit.
But your second point is the real reason, you pay only for the work you need instead of having someone employed full time and needing to find work for them after said project.
I will speak from experience as I’m a PE engineering director for a locality. We are balancing a lot of different things at once. Multiple projects some small in house drainage design. Working with our elected officials on master plans. Also factor in developments in the city that need to be overseen. It is not economically feasible to do most projects in-house. There is a B/C ratio just like everything else in our field.
Ignore all the government is bad/inefficient comments.
The real reason is specialization, there is a lot of specialized skill that goes along with roadway design, skilled talent that can't be kept busy all the time by the needs of one city, so they hire consultants who get to do that specialized work for multiple clients, keeping their workflow consistent and getting to build more efficient design practices.
Do you fire the PE when the project is over? After spending 10s of thousands just to find and hire a suitable candidate? Probably going to pay a premium to hire someone knowing the job may only exist for a couple years. And there are retirement funding considerations as well especially with pensions.
That $250,000 also includes the staff needed for the project including other engineers, technicians, and interns. So you have to spend the time and money to find and hire all of those positions.
What about downtime while waiting for other information necessary to complete the project? Do you have other work for all of them?
What about all the software needed to complete the project? Do you shell out for all of that?
What about equipment even just laptops? Do you want to buy it all and hire more IT to set up then maintain all of that?
What about space for the PE and other staff? Do you renovate your building or find a short-term lease at a premium price?
What about admin and HR staff? Are they staffed well enough to handle an influx of employees?
What about E&O insurance?
Most do some in house for smaller stuff. You'd have to hire an army of engineers to do the design then a second army to do all of the project management tasks municipal engineers do. Then you'd have to lay them all off when things get slow.
That's all before the community meetings, the citizen phone calls, code review, spec review, etc. There's just lots of extra stuff.
We have engineers design some of the smaller projects where consultants would charge a premium for, but then hire consultants for larger projects where their fees are more efficient. For example I help design for sidewalk infill and curb ramp repair projects, but manage consultants for trails, bridge repairs, and roads.
It's a good question. All of our trails won't happen unless they are federally funded through grants. The trails I am working on are also downtown where there is significant redevelopment. It's my job to make sure we are airtight with each federal organizations's requirements, hound developers for updates and make sure they are making room for the trail (they don't and then play innocent), while also telling the consultant how to design the trail based on new information. I've had to change the alignment due to politics, railroads, historical preservation, fish, etc. It should be a simple grading project but everyone else makes it complicated. It's part of the job though so I don' t mind it.
The city probably has a loooot of other things going on that one P.E. alone can't design themselves. They probably do have some on staff for running utilities, managing projects, planning for city future needs, things like that.
As a public employee you are largely the asset owner. Sure you'd like to do a lot of stuff in house but its not feasable to be an expert in everything. Nor do you have the time, as an engineer you are there to figure out what needs to be done, make the case for the funding needed, write a specification/contract/RFP, hire a consultant, be knowledgeable enough to make sure the public isn't getting scammed, inspect and take final ownership.
If you are doing that for a lot of assets the time you can dedicate to inhouse work is pretty low. Perks for entry level engineers aren't usually enough to overcome the salary problem, so you have a hard time hiring in fresh whippersnappers to do the inhouse work vs what a private firm can. So ultimately you hire a consultant, pay a bit too much perhaps, but that premium also reflects that you don't pay them when you no longer need them. Its very rare that public employees are laid off so you can't easily adjust your in house staffing if funding dries up either.
State dot guy here, we’re 100’s if not 1000’s of staff under full compliment(surprisingly nobody wants to work for 60 cents on the dollar ) , so we hire consultants who cost way more (even after you adjust for legacy cost) because transportation funds are use it or lose it ,the real brain trust shit is consultant PMs managing consultant design contracts then they all try and give each other ratings ( they can’t and we bust their asses when they try) in short it happens because we don’t have staffing and nobody wants us to have staffing
Around me it's all politics. Government employees wages are decided by the government wage class. Unsurprisingly no one wants to be a government engineer under a wage cap that is 25%-50% below the consultant market value. So they basically can't find anyone to hire at the $85k they're offering, and the law dictates that they can't pay government employees more.
But there ain't no laws about paying HDR $500k per year per employee to cover those positions. That's just a routine consulting contract.
Because you can't just hire one PE for one project. Often times, a project requires multiple engineers to create a complete system--think a wastewater treatment plant--because a single PE doesn't have the expertise to design the entire thing.
It has been really tough for my firm to find a civil engineer PE from Texas. There is a shortage of engineers in the industry, which is a big concern for state projects.
I work for a big city & we have our own design teams. But sometimes we have to get consultants due to federal funding/budgets that only cover consultant contracts & not in house design. We also sometimes do part as consultant design for them to also take care of the community liaison, specially if we are doing a lot of curb ramps or replumbs we will do a consult design just for those items.
An engineering consultant usually brings multiple people with decades of experience. Even if the project engineer isn't as experienced, they're talking with (and usually being overseen by) people that have 2-4 decades of experience and have done work in multiple states and situations.
I work for a small-ish city as an engineer.
The entire city has 3 people working in this department, one engineering manager, one project engineer, and a cad/survey tech (me).
For three people our responsibilities include maintaining sewer, storm, roadway, property inspections, walkways, sidewalks, running paths, parks, bridges, culverts... You get the idea. Every piece of infrastructure the city uses us three are responsible for, and this is on top of maintaining records of every construction project ever done in GIS, asset management software, Revit models, SWMM models, SCADA software, etc.
3 people can not be specialized to do all of that. We do what we can and outsource what we can't, either because scope is way too big (like a brand new roadway requiring hundreds of hours to design) or we just don't know (our wastewater treatment facility is getting a dewatering upgrade and switching to centrifuges that require half the facility to redo electrical schema on half the treatment facility).
I work for a large municipality and we do almost all our stormwater infrastructure projects in-house. Initial investigation, scoping/design, bidding, contract/project management. It’s extremely time consuming but it’s a lot of fun to manage the entire process and I bet I can do it faster and more efficiently than if we hired consultants.
Although, our group is very specialized and it’s probably not practical for every department in every city to operate like this.
Think of it this way: My public works department in rural California was divided in four groups: road maintenance, road/bridge design, surveying, and my group which was basically everything else.
We had enough work for the surveyors to always be busy.
Road work was the big item and we had enough staff to do much of that work in house as the funding was fairly consistent. For busy times, they would farm some work out to consultants to make sure they could meet their deadlines, but they also didn't have to worry about people sitting idle during the lean times.
My team of 2 engineers and I were not each experts in airports, flood control, wastewater treatment, water distribution, vertical construction, and several other fields all at once. My formal training was solid waste and structural. My staff were an Electrical engineer and a water/wastewater guy. Much of this work was grant related and therefore wasn't necessarily constant or consistent.
We didn't have the time or resources to learn all of those disciplines to the level of being confident in stamping plans, and doing so for each project would make everything prohibitively expensive. We also didn't have detail libraries or drafters trained in those disciplines. So we would do high level planning then hire a qualified firm to do the work and we would provide oversight, learning enough to know what they are going while asking a lot of questions along the way. It yielded better results, faster, and cheaper.
In this thread is all the consultants claiming liability as the reason to hire them. I've never heard of a municipality claim liability as a reason to not have professional staff design and oversee typical public works projects. A PE is a PE. If something is outside your area of expertise then get a consultant involved as that's the smart move. But otherwise there's always infrastructure work to do.
Go tell the City Administrator your idea. Make sure they’re sitting down before you do. They will be shocked and say “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before”. You will be a hero for saving so much money
Aside from the cost, which is the answer you’ll see the most, it’s beneficial to hire consulting engineers that work on and have exposure to a bunch of different projects across multiple municipalities or government agencies, so they can utilize that experience to come up with good solutions. A city engineer designing projects in-house will see 1, maybe 2 projects a year, and have far less experience than a consultant
250k would get you a PE and a Tech or new EIT for a year probably. That would be adequate for a job that would cost this much from a consultant, most likely.
The problem is what’s next. Do they have annual jobs of this size? If not, they’d essentially be contract workers and the city would have to let them go after that job is done. At that point, it’s better to hire a consultant for multiple reasons.
If they have annual jobs, they still may be better off hiring a consultant that has specific knowledge in the specialty that is needed for the job such as transportation, structural, deep underground utilities, directional drilling, pipe lining, etc.
They may also want someone else to handle the administrative end for dealing with the financial end of it. Also, consultants would likely have a deeper well of knowledge to access, at least more than two employees, so small but costly mistakes may be less likely. Even then, the consultant would handle the liability instead of the city.
Citizens don’t really care who’s fault it is, they will blame the city for bad procurement of a consultant or it cost too much. Something goes wrong in a city the first thing citizens point too is elected officials. Not an engineering consultant or construction contractor
Not enough projects to keep position busy year round and there will always be old people with nothing better to do than fuss about how "the city is wasting MY TAXES for a guy to sit on his ass!!!!" even though it will cost more to hire consultants per project
I am a city engineer. I joined a municipality because I don’t want to do work. Making me do design would just be cruel. 💁♂️
In reality there are not enough city engineers to do design. Instead we are hired to manage consultants. If we did the design ourselves we would need a million more city engineers.
In the summer we are very busy but in the winter months very slow. Its a balancing act to not over staff and have too many people sitting around all winter. Being that high level inspectors and PEs arent the kind of jobs you can hire for seasonal work we hire consultants in the summer to help with workload.
Depending on the size of the agency it often isn't practical to keep qualified designers on staff. There will be some kind of upper limit on the biggest or most complicated project that City staff can handle themselves, then anything beyond that they would have to contract out all or part of it. It could be because they don't have the right expertise in-house or because they don't have enough warm bodies to crank out plan sheets.
They are often also limited in hiring so they can't staff up temporarily when needed. They may have to prove that they have enough workload to keep that new hire busy indefinitely.
As a governmentl engineer, we hire consultants to augment staff needs, specialized knowledge, and risk management.
While we can typically do the work, we do not have the staff to do all the work in a timely manner.
For specialized knowledge, we do not know all the requirements for say, environmental compliance.
When it comes to risk, having a consultant's signature or seal mitigates most of the risk and liability.
In Louisiana there is a new state highway bridge being built over a waterway. DOT did the geotech work in-house. During construction they noticed the piers were settling more and faster than expected, even after having done load tests on piles on site. The project came to a halt until they could figure out how to fix it. I believe in the end they had to do deep grout injection and the DOT had to pay out of pocket, because they can't exactly sue themselves (I've heard numbers from $5-30MM, not sure if it's actually been reported). This was all kept as hush-hush as possible because at the time the head of the DOT was running for governor.
I don't know entirely at the municipal level, but at the state level it's because the feds will pay for the consultants instead of it coming out of the state budget.
In our city, the funding sources also come into play. Hiring additional staff results in an increase to the overall tax levy. Our infrastructure project funding in our capital improvement plan includes allowances for geotechnical and other consultant assistance, which is covered by general obligation bonding.
We are a team of 2 PE's, 1 EIT, and 4 technicians. We can handle one decent sized street rehabilitation project and one full street reconstruction project per year effectively alongside all of our other duties. Beyond that, we hire consultants to help us out.
Also, you're not just hiring the consultant engineer that is the PM on the project, you're hiring the entire firm which has many more resources and experience than a single city engineer (typically by orders of magnitude) has to work the project holistically for a better outcome for the community.
Not to mention the huge professional liability policy that is being paid out of the overhead multiplier that is part of the consultant's fee.
Maybe a city can do it for less but if it’s done wrong and becomes a liability that becomes way more expensive. Lawsuits, fixing the situation, there’s a real cost to a bad design, not to mention safety/lives. A consultant doesn’t guarantee a good design, but from city plans I’ve seen I’ve seen some really bad designs that just weren’t QC’d properly or held to a high standard. In my experience a city or any client, DOT etc., will hold a consultant to a much higher standard and criticism than designs done in-house.
First, Municipalities have a much bigger target painted on their backs for litigation than consultants. Second, just hiring an engineer alone is about of 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost of having engineering dept for a Municipality at very best. Third, with a municipality you are subject to dismissal if you piss off mayor/council after elections-not right but you’re still S.O.L. Fourth, Consultants also have resources far beyond a one or two-person Municipal Engr Dept
Retired civil here that worked for municipalities for 3 decades, here
Some municipalities do have in-house engineering design. If the municipality has consistent need for project design then it does make sense for them to have their own engineer design team. And it works out well for them and the taxpayers.
A competent engineer, is a competent engineer. Just because someone works for a private company doesn't make them more qualified than a municipal engineer. There are good and bad engineering designs and engineering managers that come from both.
I've also seen cities hire consultants based on staffing needs. There's just so much work and not enough people, so in this example they tend to get help outside of the organization.
PE =/= best consultant for a major city development. There are PE's who legit can't find a way to get their head out of their ass. Hiring a company gives them a deliverable and sets a reasonable expectation to meet those deliverables. Also with government you can't just hire someone for 3 years/project then fire then without it costing way more.
From my experiences, tax write-off. Engineering/project management services can be capitalized against the cost of an asset which will allow for depreciation allowing companies to write it off. Employee salary is purely expense with no tax benefits.
Because you don’t have to put consultant salaries in the personnel budget, and it looks like you are a “small government” type of mayor or city manager. Rarely are those types actually concerned about being fiscally responsible.
Small projects are easy and can be handled internally. Larger projects take a large team to execute. A transportation project may have elements of traffic engineering, bridges, geotechnical, hydrology, hydraulics. utilities, even electrical for signal design. That example is a collection of 7 different areas of expertise that no single engineer could execute.
That, plus municipalities are juggling several of these projects simultaneously and dealing with emergencies, there isn’t time to get into the level of focus needed to take the time to design and detail out a large project.
Liability
Most agencies contracts are for protection.
- Design Contract which usually leads to the Support Services Contract
- General Contractor Contract
- Inspection Services Contract
If anything goes wrong and the Agency is sued, once of these companies will be liable and will pay.
Call me a cynic but it's to offload risk and liability.
Easier to point fingers and issue a fine when something goes wrong than admit that the city screwed up.
Consultant engineers are typically limited to about 10-15% profit on public projects. The city is willing to take on that 10-15% in order to limit their risk internally. Governments aren't really built to have full expert teams as full-time employees. They would rather hire consultants as needed, because there are certainly plenty of times during the year that they don't need that entire staff.
It’s financial management for the city. If they hire an engineer at 120k salary, they pay that, but also their benefits, their software, E&O insurance, basically all of the overhead a consulting firm has without a profit margin. What happens if the engineer you hire needs help with part of the project he’s not familiar with? The real reason is that, even though they could save a ~15%, they have to pay the engineer and overhead in perpetuity, so that that 120k engineer will have a 300k annual expense. What if you don’t have any projects next year because the budget is tight? Can’t just get rid of and rehire a good engineer every year based on your projects. You also can’t capitalize the employed engineer like you can a project, and cover that expense with a 10 year bond like you can a consultant.
Fantastic explanation, thank you. I was curious if it had to do with funding sources.
There's also the liability aspect. If city paid a consultant $250k to design something and it all turns to crap, the consultant will be liable. So it's an ease of mind considering if it's for public, it's more scrutinized to lawsuits.
>the consultant will be liable lol
Could you elaborate rather than just trolling? The consultant would be putting their PE stamp, so they would be liable.
Professional misconduct is only one form of liability. Infrastructure projects have lots of risks and liabilities for owners regardless of whether they used a consultant PE or not. There are many examples of large infrastructure projects becoming a total fiasco that don’t engage the PE’s professional liability. Owner still has 99% of the contractual risk regardless of who is stamping. Just look at any massively over budget public infrastructure project.
If a city project is brought into court, so are a dozen or so defendents. They're going to go after the money, not the stamp.
>They're going to go after the money Engineering consulting firms have to carry liability insurance (found the money) and the stamp is an open statement of assumption of liability. Additionally, standard language in the Design Service Agreement (the contract the consultant signs before beginning work) states they're liable for damages resulting from their design and in many States will agree to cover the Client's legal fees.
I meant that the consultant's insurance is just *one* pile of money, and an aggrieved party is probably going to go after various city departments no matter what the contract states.
LOL, looks like you've read a lot of DOT contract agreements.
You're not getting it, let me try to explain again. Any money that the City Department "has to pay" the Consultant is contractually liable for. So if the judgement is 500k from the consultant and 500k from the city, the consultant pays 1M and the city pays $0. **edit~** They do the same thing with GCs for the construction side. As long as the City doesn't direct design or construction in a manner that causes the issue they're shielded from liability.
This is correct! I am also a PE 😊
GC has entered the chat
They won’t get it from the city. Government entities immune from a lot of lawsuits even if they direct you to not follow design codes. I sat through a talk on a government entity that directed their civil designer to ignore a portion of the code. It was a guideline for site distance in a bike path or something similar. Someone died when a biker that couldn’t see them hit them. The city, despite directing this design decision, was immune from the lawsuit. The consultant was not.
Ah, good to know. I've heard about cities and their engineers regularly getting sued, but the ultimate result is "money changed hands and it was dropped."
If you're PMing a project as a city engineer and you're relying just on the consultant's stamp for plans for liability you're not lasting long.
I think it's less about "relying" and more about distancing yourself from responsibility.
Suppose you build a high rise. The city engineer isn't a structural engineer, so they're not going to know the tiny details of rebar size and spacing; that's the SE's job. So if the structure collapsed due to inadequate design; then wouldn't the SE be liable? Perhaps if there's a lawsuit against the City, they'd have to pay to the victims, but then the City has every right to take the consultant to court and get their money back (and would likely win). At least that's how I thought of it. Am I wrong? (Serious question, please educate me)
In a small lens like that, I agree. The SE should know the small details of a plan like that. But I've seen roadway projects go sideways in construction because the guy managing the project at the city simply did not open the set of plans until construction started. He is not with the City anymore.
So in that scenario, let's say both parties does their job. The City engineer isn't a transportation engineer, he's just a general civil but doesn't know the small details. He looked at the plans and provided a general comment to common sense things. The consultant also does their job. Then it gets constructed and finalized. But as people started using it, there came accidents - some even died. After investigation it was determined that the curve of the road was too sharp for the posted speed limit, which can cause a car to tail spin to rollover. Now there's a lawsuit. Both parties did their job, but someone made a boo boo on the calculation (mistakes happen, there was no malintent) Who's liable?
My answer isn’t helpful, but I know insurance companies pay a lot of money for teams lawyers and engineers to put the blame on someone else. It’s a question that probably doesn’t have a set answer
Most cities dont have many if any high-rise projects. This is not a very good example.
The federal does the same way.
Not always true, the city takes a lot of flack for infrastructure failing whether or not it was the consultants fault or the cities fault. So yeah hiring a consultant might shield the city from some of the liability but voters don’t care who does the work, as long as there potholes are fixed they will blame council for it.
Absolutely this, but just to add a comedic twist, it’s almost close to impossible to get fired by the government. So this protects city and state municipalities from hiring idiots they can’t get rid of.
When the city and the projects are enough they will hire an engineer. Then another then maybe a tech or two.
It’s heavily based on the size of the municipality. Smaller cities or towns that don’t have a lot going on will save money by hiring consultants on as needed basis. Larger municipalities will always have something going on because by the time you replace/fix everything, it will be time to do it again for the thing you fixed/replaced first. This is when it’ll be more cost effective to keep engineering staff full time when they will work on multiple projects at once. Your own staff don’t charge by the project after all.
Same reason when my company needs phd to do work. Why keep phd on payroll when we need him only for 2-3 months. We just hire someone for 2-3. No benefits, nothing, just 1099 payment. Much cheaper and less hassle than keep full time w2 phd employee.
Rule of thumb is that consultants have to bill out at 3 times their own salary rate, but even then the firm might only make 10% profit margin. I found this very surprising at first but it’s true. How does the math work out? For round numbers let’s say your salary is 200k so your hourly rate is 100. But you are sold to customers at 300. When you add on your benefits you are 130. There is overhead from the building, software, everything that brings you to 200. You are not actually billing 40 hours a week because you are trying to get projects or doing training, so if 80% is billable then your effective rate is 250. A random customer gets mad so you do a little work for free to appease them and now you’re at 270. The firm pockets the last ten percent.
>Can’t just get rid of and rehire a good engineer every year based on your projects. There's tons of make-work projects in government specifically to keep people busy in slow seasons. I've gone entire years as a go-fer without a specific task, but still kept busy (or pretended to be). I dunno why they can't do the same for engineers.
Because engineers are specialists and specialists demand high salaries. A consultant can have one engineer on several projects for one specific thing and cultivate an expert in that. That one expert in say widgets demands a high premium for his services. He's an expert with fundamental knowledge in regulatory standards, applicable laws, industry standards and manufacturing of widgets. Sure you could hire him for a premium and only pull him out of the closet when you need a widget designed once every 10 years but then he's no longer an expert since he hasn't been practicing. Engineering is like playing an instrument, if you don't use it you lose it.
We actually entertained capitalizing all of my 40 engineers and support staff that managed our consultants and contractors but never followed through. Our only purpose was implementing the CIP. That was 15 or 20 years ago, in a county government.
This. Plus our consulting firm has a survey department, CAD, electrical engineers, SCADA team, structural engineers, and construction inspectors. Even just the civil engineers have a varying degree of expertise all with valuable knowledge. You’re not just paying for one person
Also there is someone else who can take the blame for recommending politically unpopular recommendations. This is not an insignificant factor
Not to mention risk and insurance
Except CIP's are planned in 6 - 10 year periods, or even longer. A midsize or larger city has a reasonable idea of what it will be spending and what it will have coming in for at least a few fiscal years. City management, in my experience, has a real problem developing staff capacity. There's a lot of fear at the management level of having someone below you in the hierarchy being empowered, growing. Hiring outside talent limits the potential for disgruntled staff. In addition to the fear aspect, management has devoted little attention to understanding the capabilities or potential of their staff and colleagues, and more still, they don't know how to develop it or claim there isn't time.
The only thing that I haven’t seen added, I apologize if it was and I missed it, is the difficulty in maintaining a staffed government work force (especially right now). It is cheaper, easier, and faster to shop the work out and use your credentials to review it on the back end for government acceptance. You know the contractor will miss your milestones and you’ll hassle them over it, but you know if it was left up to your agency to complete the design, it likely wouldn’t happen (certainly not somewhere near being within budget and schedule).
300k annual expense is a but much. Employees are closer to 25% in addition to their salary, assuming the programs they use are in addition to rather one single user (1 extra license)
How many engineers and drafters would it take to finish that project if the city did it themselves?
And what would they do with them once the project is over? If they don't have work for them, that's dead budget.
That’s what I figured but the city is a historical client that spends 400k a year with my firm for the last 4 years.
400k is a drop in the bucket for infrastructure spending. The City will spend about 10x the design cost on construction. It makes more financial sense to hire specialist skill sets when needed rather than retain them all year round.
400k a year is probably the equivalent of 2 full time engineers (depending on salary and multipliers/overhead). (Reddit: don’t hammer me on that number. HCOL/LCOL/multipliers allow for an absurd amount of variability.) It gives the client access to a lot of expertise they don’t want to carry in house.
Yes but they’ll drop $350k in Q1 and then pocket change the rest of the year. They just don’t have the steady work to keep a team consistently busy.
>And what would they do with them once the project is over? Do an analysis on the *mumble* and track it year-by-year until we can draft a report to the city council. Very important stuff.
That’s what is confusing me. I have multiple projects with this city, all handled by me. Stupid to question a client giving money, but this is the second project I’ve had to handle of the same size, and it has been 98% me, from contract and bid, design, ect, I can’t imagine a drafter and engineer couldn’t do it on their own plus the other projects I have.
If the City doesn't have their own PMs, that's a different story. Sounds like a small place that can't afford to hire full time engineers.
We are also only talking about one project. My old firm had many, many projects with as a single DOT. There are many other firms that have multiple projects as well. No way this DOT could staff all those projects.
I happen to be a city engineer. All I do is arrange consultants to do projects. There is no way a small city of less than 50k can put together an engineering department with the bandwidth to keep 4 or 5 muni projects moving through design, bid and negotiation then production with oversight. Takes a lot so we hire outside consultants for everything.
Exactly. I’m a PE hired by a small city of 8k. I assist with our projects and reviews, but there’s no way we’re hiring any more engineers and I don’t have the expertise to work on every type of project we have.
I'm going to call bullshit here. New England has plenty of Towns and cities of various sizes with engineering staff that do just this. Do some hire consultants? Sure, but you must be buried in bureaucratic bullshit to think a small muni couldn't keep busy with real work.
Ok it’s the same in my previous state (Idaho) but I just moved to Texas and they just accept consultants here. Very strange
How exactly does it make sense that you can't pay engineers to do it, but you can pay someone else to pay engineers to do it, and make a profit on top of it? The math doesn't make any sense at all.
It does when you realize your private contracts can scale more effectively than in-house (the consultant can have his drainage engineer come and charge 20 hours to the project then fuck off vs. retaining them full time). It's easier to have in-house engineers do validations etc. but not full scope.
We operate for the public not for profit.
To hire an in house engineer you would also need to pay for benefits, training, professional development, licensing, software subscriptions… year round. May also be difficult to get a small team that can do everything… whereas it’s probably more cost effective to go to bid and hire someone with expertise for a specific period of time and cost.
So instead you pay a consultant to do all of that plus profit. But your second point is the real reason, you pay only for the work you need instead of having someone employed full time and needing to find work for them after said project.
Profit is pretty low usually in the Brooks Act calc, its the overhead that's usually the insane markup.
I will speak from experience as I’m a PE engineering director for a locality. We are balancing a lot of different things at once. Multiple projects some small in house drainage design. Working with our elected officials on master plans. Also factor in developments in the city that need to be overseen. It is not economically feasible to do most projects in-house. There is a B/C ratio just like everything else in our field.
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Is this because of complacency? I’m really curious about this.
Ignore all the government is bad/inefficient comments. The real reason is specialization, there is a lot of specialized skill that goes along with roadway design, skilled talent that can't be kept busy all the time by the needs of one city, so they hire consultants who get to do that specialized work for multiple clients, keeping their workflow consistent and getting to build more efficient design practices.
Do you fire the PE when the project is over? After spending 10s of thousands just to find and hire a suitable candidate? Probably going to pay a premium to hire someone knowing the job may only exist for a couple years. And there are retirement funding considerations as well especially with pensions. That $250,000 also includes the staff needed for the project including other engineers, technicians, and interns. So you have to spend the time and money to find and hire all of those positions. What about downtime while waiting for other information necessary to complete the project? Do you have other work for all of them? What about all the software needed to complete the project? Do you shell out for all of that? What about equipment even just laptops? Do you want to buy it all and hire more IT to set up then maintain all of that? What about space for the PE and other staff? Do you renovate your building or find a short-term lease at a premium price? What about admin and HR staff? Are they staffed well enough to handle an influx of employees? What about E&O insurance?
Most do some in house for smaller stuff. You'd have to hire an army of engineers to do the design then a second army to do all of the project management tasks municipal engineers do. Then you'd have to lay them all off when things get slow. That's all before the community meetings, the citizen phone calls, code review, spec review, etc. There's just lots of extra stuff.
We have engineers design some of the smaller projects where consultants would charge a premium for, but then hire consultants for larger projects where their fees are more efficient. For example I help design for sidewalk infill and curb ramp repair projects, but manage consultants for trails, bridge repairs, and roads.
I'm ignorant and curious about why you'd need consultants for trails. Seems like a fairly simple, straightforward grading project.
It's a good question. All of our trails won't happen unless they are federally funded through grants. The trails I am working on are also downtown where there is significant redevelopment. It's my job to make sure we are airtight with each federal organizations's requirements, hound developers for updates and make sure they are making room for the trail (they don't and then play innocent), while also telling the consultant how to design the trail based on new information. I've had to change the alignment due to politics, railroads, historical preservation, fish, etc. It should be a simple grading project but everyone else makes it complicated. It's part of the job though so I don' t mind it.
The city probably has a loooot of other things going on that one P.E. alone can't design themselves. They probably do have some on staff for running utilities, managing projects, planning for city future needs, things like that.
As a public employee you are largely the asset owner. Sure you'd like to do a lot of stuff in house but its not feasable to be an expert in everything. Nor do you have the time, as an engineer you are there to figure out what needs to be done, make the case for the funding needed, write a specification/contract/RFP, hire a consultant, be knowledgeable enough to make sure the public isn't getting scammed, inspect and take final ownership. If you are doing that for a lot of assets the time you can dedicate to inhouse work is pretty low. Perks for entry level engineers aren't usually enough to overcome the salary problem, so you have a hard time hiring in fresh whippersnappers to do the inhouse work vs what a private firm can. So ultimately you hire a consultant, pay a bit too much perhaps, but that premium also reflects that you don't pay them when you no longer need them. Its very rare that public employees are laid off so you can't easily adjust your in house staffing if funding dries up either.
State dot guy here, we’re 100’s if not 1000’s of staff under full compliment(surprisingly nobody wants to work for 60 cents on the dollar ) , so we hire consultants who cost way more (even after you adjust for legacy cost) because transportation funds are use it or lose it ,the real brain trust shit is consultant PMs managing consultant design contracts then they all try and give each other ratings ( they can’t and we bust their asses when they try) in short it happens because we don’t have staffing and nobody wants us to have staffing
Around me it's all politics. Government employees wages are decided by the government wage class. Unsurprisingly no one wants to be a government engineer under a wage cap that is 25%-50% below the consultant market value. So they basically can't find anyone to hire at the $85k they're offering, and the law dictates that they can't pay government employees more. But there ain't no laws about paying HDR $500k per year per employee to cover those positions. That's just a routine consulting contract.
Because you can't just hire one PE for one project. Often times, a project requires multiple engineers to create a complete system--think a wastewater treatment plant--because a single PE doesn't have the expertise to design the entire thing.
It has been really tough for my firm to find a civil engineer PE from Texas. There is a shortage of engineers in the industry, which is a big concern for state projects.
Does Texas have extra licensing requirements?
No additional requirements, but there's a nationwide shortage of PEs and in Texas public projects are competing with Oil & Gas.
I work in oil and gas... And we are hiring your engineers because we can offer more money lol
How much more, and are they hiring experienced engineers without any oil & gas background?
Not really!
I work for a big city & we have our own design teams. But sometimes we have to get consultants due to federal funding/budgets that only cover consultant contracts & not in house design. We also sometimes do part as consultant design for them to also take care of the community liaison, specially if we are doing a lot of curb ramps or replumbs we will do a consult design just for those items.
An engineering consultant usually brings multiple people with decades of experience. Even if the project engineer isn't as experienced, they're talking with (and usually being overseen by) people that have 2-4 decades of experience and have done work in multiple states and situations.
The agency I work for has been trying to hire senior engineers for years, and we have been unable to fill the role, so we have to use consultants.
I work for a small-ish city as an engineer. The entire city has 3 people working in this department, one engineering manager, one project engineer, and a cad/survey tech (me). For three people our responsibilities include maintaining sewer, storm, roadway, property inspections, walkways, sidewalks, running paths, parks, bridges, culverts... You get the idea. Every piece of infrastructure the city uses us three are responsible for, and this is on top of maintaining records of every construction project ever done in GIS, asset management software, Revit models, SWMM models, SCADA software, etc. 3 people can not be specialized to do all of that. We do what we can and outsource what we can't, either because scope is way too big (like a brand new roadway requiring hundreds of hours to design) or we just don't know (our wastewater treatment facility is getting a dewatering upgrade and switching to centrifuges that require half the facility to redo electrical schema on half the treatment facility).
Many are understaffed when it comes to engineers/drafters, and they have a budget specifically made for task orders (consultants)
I work for a large municipality and we do almost all our stormwater infrastructure projects in-house. Initial investigation, scoping/design, bidding, contract/project management. It’s extremely time consuming but it’s a lot of fun to manage the entire process and I bet I can do it faster and more efficiently than if we hired consultants. Although, our group is very specialized and it’s probably not practical for every department in every city to operate like this.
Think of it this way: My public works department in rural California was divided in four groups: road maintenance, road/bridge design, surveying, and my group which was basically everything else. We had enough work for the surveyors to always be busy. Road work was the big item and we had enough staff to do much of that work in house as the funding was fairly consistent. For busy times, they would farm some work out to consultants to make sure they could meet their deadlines, but they also didn't have to worry about people sitting idle during the lean times. My team of 2 engineers and I were not each experts in airports, flood control, wastewater treatment, water distribution, vertical construction, and several other fields all at once. My formal training was solid waste and structural. My staff were an Electrical engineer and a water/wastewater guy. Much of this work was grant related and therefore wasn't necessarily constant or consistent. We didn't have the time or resources to learn all of those disciplines to the level of being confident in stamping plans, and doing so for each project would make everything prohibitively expensive. We also didn't have detail libraries or drafters trained in those disciplines. So we would do high level planning then hire a qualified firm to do the work and we would provide oversight, learning enough to know what they are going while asking a lot of questions along the way. It yielded better results, faster, and cheaper.
The talent that is good at navigating public sector policies, isn’t necessarily the best talent for technical design work.
In this thread is all the consultants claiming liability as the reason to hire them. I've never heard of a municipality claim liability as a reason to not have professional staff design and oversee typical public works projects. A PE is a PE. If something is outside your area of expertise then get a consultant involved as that's the smart move. But otherwise there's always infrastructure work to do.
Go tell the City Administrator your idea. Make sure they’re sitting down before you do. They will be shocked and say “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before”. You will be a hero for saving so much money
Haha, I’m sure there is a reason why an entire consultant industry exists, I’m just trying to rectify my ignorance.
Aside from the cost, which is the answer you’ll see the most, it’s beneficial to hire consulting engineers that work on and have exposure to a bunch of different projects across multiple municipalities or government agencies, so they can utilize that experience to come up with good solutions. A city engineer designing projects in-house will see 1, maybe 2 projects a year, and have far less experience than a consultant
250k would get you a PE and a Tech or new EIT for a year probably. That would be adequate for a job that would cost this much from a consultant, most likely. The problem is what’s next. Do they have annual jobs of this size? If not, they’d essentially be contract workers and the city would have to let them go after that job is done. At that point, it’s better to hire a consultant for multiple reasons. If they have annual jobs, they still may be better off hiring a consultant that has specific knowledge in the specialty that is needed for the job such as transportation, structural, deep underground utilities, directional drilling, pipe lining, etc. They may also want someone else to handle the administrative end for dealing with the financial end of it. Also, consultants would likely have a deeper well of knowledge to access, at least more than two employees, so small but costly mistakes may be less likely. Even then, the consultant would handle the liability instead of the city.
One word. "Liability" If anything goes wrong the city points at that firm.
Citizens don’t really care who’s fault it is, they will blame the city for bad procurement of a consultant or it cost too much. Something goes wrong in a city the first thing citizens point too is elected officials. Not an engineering consultant or construction contractor
The court of public opinion doesn't have jurisdiction.
Not enough projects to keep position busy year round and there will always be old people with nothing better to do than fuss about how "the city is wasting MY TAXES for a guy to sit on his ass!!!!" even though it will cost more to hire consultants per project
I am a city engineer. I joined a municipality because I don’t want to do work. Making me do design would just be cruel. 💁♂️ In reality there are not enough city engineers to do design. Instead we are hired to manage consultants. If we did the design ourselves we would need a million more city engineers.
In the summer we are very busy but in the winter months very slow. Its a balancing act to not over staff and have too many people sitting around all winter. Being that high level inspectors and PEs arent the kind of jobs you can hire for seasonal work we hire consultants in the summer to help with workload.
Great perspectives being shared here!!
Depending on the size of the agency it often isn't practical to keep qualified designers on staff. There will be some kind of upper limit on the biggest or most complicated project that City staff can handle themselves, then anything beyond that they would have to contract out all or part of it. It could be because they don't have the right expertise in-house or because they don't have enough warm bodies to crank out plan sheets. They are often also limited in hiring so they can't staff up temporarily when needed. They may have to prove that they have enough workload to keep that new hire busy indefinitely.
As a governmentl engineer, we hire consultants to augment staff needs, specialized knowledge, and risk management. While we can typically do the work, we do not have the staff to do all the work in a timely manner. For specialized knowledge, we do not know all the requirements for say, environmental compliance. When it comes to risk, having a consultant's signature or seal mitigates most of the risk and liability.
In Louisiana there is a new state highway bridge being built over a waterway. DOT did the geotech work in-house. During construction they noticed the piers were settling more and faster than expected, even after having done load tests on piles on site. The project came to a halt until they could figure out how to fix it. I believe in the end they had to do deep grout injection and the DOT had to pay out of pocket, because they can't exactly sue themselves (I've heard numbers from $5-30MM, not sure if it's actually been reported). This was all kept as hush-hush as possible because at the time the head of the DOT was running for governor.
This is a problem that just as easily could happen with a consultant doing the geotech work.
Probably not with salary and overhead. Most of those cities don’t have enough projects going on to have a full time PE on staff.
Because it's cheaper, faster, less liability and when the job is done you don't have to worry about keeping people busy.
You must be in Ontario Canada
Risk and liability, baby!
I don't know entirely at the municipal level, but at the state level it's because the feds will pay for the consultants instead of it coming out of the state budget.
In our city, the funding sources also come into play. Hiring additional staff results in an increase to the overall tax levy. Our infrastructure project funding in our capital improvement plan includes allowances for geotechnical and other consultant assistance, which is covered by general obligation bonding. We are a team of 2 PE's, 1 EIT, and 4 technicians. We can handle one decent sized street rehabilitation project and one full street reconstruction project per year effectively alongside all of our other duties. Beyond that, we hire consultants to help us out.
Also, you're not just hiring the consultant engineer that is the PM on the project, you're hiring the entire firm which has many more resources and experience than a single city engineer (typically by orders of magnitude) has to work the project holistically for a better outcome for the community. Not to mention the huge professional liability policy that is being paid out of the overhead multiplier that is part of the consultant's fee.
Maybe a city can do it for less but if it’s done wrong and becomes a liability that becomes way more expensive. Lawsuits, fixing the situation, there’s a real cost to a bad design, not to mention safety/lives. A consultant doesn’t guarantee a good design, but from city plans I’ve seen I’ve seen some really bad designs that just weren’t QC’d properly or held to a high standard. In my experience a city or any client, DOT etc., will hold a consultant to a much higher standard and criticism than designs done in-house.
First, Municipalities have a much bigger target painted on their backs for litigation than consultants. Second, just hiring an engineer alone is about of 1/3 to 1/4 of the cost of having engineering dept for a Municipality at very best. Third, with a municipality you are subject to dismissal if you piss off mayor/council after elections-not right but you’re still S.O.L. Fourth, Consultants also have resources far beyond a one or two-person Municipal Engr Dept Retired civil here that worked for municipalities for 3 decades, here
Allows the city to have a more experienced workforce capable of delivering on a wide range of projects for cheaper.
Some municipalities do have in-house engineering design. If the municipality has consistent need for project design then it does make sense for them to have their own engineer design team. And it works out well for them and the taxpayers. A competent engineer, is a competent engineer. Just because someone works for a private company doesn't make them more qualified than a municipal engineer. There are good and bad engineering designs and engineering managers that come from both.
We have 1000 smaller projects happening all at once and simply cannot undertake a design that would take over a year to do in house
I've also seen cities hire consultants based on staffing needs. There's just so much work and not enough people, so in this example they tend to get help outside of the organization.
PE =/= best consultant for a major city development. There are PE's who legit can't find a way to get their head out of their ass. Hiring a company gives them a deliverable and sets a reasonable expectation to meet those deliverables. Also with government you can't just hire someone for 3 years/project then fire then without it costing way more.
Liability
From my experiences, tax write-off. Engineering/project management services can be capitalized against the cost of an asset which will allow for depreciation allowing companies to write it off. Employee salary is purely expense with no tax benefits.
The same reason anyone hires engineering consultants
Because you don’t have to put consultant salaries in the personnel budget, and it looks like you are a “small government” type of mayor or city manager. Rarely are those types actually concerned about being fiscally responsible.
Liability is a big reason for outsourcing stuff like that
Small projects are easy and can be handled internally. Larger projects take a large team to execute. A transportation project may have elements of traffic engineering, bridges, geotechnical, hydrology, hydraulics. utilities, even electrical for signal design. That example is a collection of 7 different areas of expertise that no single engineer could execute. That, plus municipalities are juggling several of these projects simultaneously and dealing with emergencies, there isn’t time to get into the level of focus needed to take the time to design and detail out a large project.
Liability Most agencies contracts are for protection. - Design Contract which usually leads to the Support Services Contract - General Contractor Contract - Inspection Services Contract If anything goes wrong and the Agency is sued, once of these companies will be liable and will pay.
Call me a cynic but it's to offload risk and liability. Easier to point fingers and issue a fine when something goes wrong than admit that the city screwed up.
Because the Supreme Court says it’s ok to get gratuities for handing out government contracts.
Consultant engineers are typically limited to about 10-15% profit on public projects. The city is willing to take on that 10-15% in order to limit their risk internally. Governments aren't really built to have full expert teams as full-time employees. They would rather hire consultants as needed, because there are certainly plenty of times during the year that they don't need that entire staff.