Smart Supervision of City Planning Consultants Stretches Your Money

Occasionally your community organization will have the opportunity to work with city planning consultants. (Don't be insulted if you live in a small town; it's just that this is what the discipline is called.) Often this occurs when your state or local government, or perhaps a private foundation, provides you with some grant funding. In fact, searching for such grant opportunities may be an important positive step if your neighborhood stands at a crossroads.

Choosing City Planning Consultants

Unless you've accumulated your own money through fundraising or dues, it's likely that your government or philanthropic sponsor will want a major role in hiring your consultant. In fact, you may have little or no voice in that decision. For example, a state program may hire one consultant for a group of communities.

For those instances where you are allowed to choose who you want, or are considering whether to hire city planning consultants, you’ll want to request references, descriptions of previous projects, resumes of the key individuals who will actually work on your project. Then you'll want to interview the qualified city planning consultants, looking for chemistry, a compatible communication style, attitudes and biases toward your type of community, and fee structure. Here are some considerations:

1. Be sure you have a carefully considered picture of what your plan will try to achieve. You might want to read about neighborhood planning.

If you have the money, it's easy to say, "Let's do a plan" when there is uncertainty about what to do. Keep in mind that your community still must make the final decisions, so make sure you aren't just stalling on the hard work of decision making. Is this a broad plan for everything in the community? (If so, you'll need consultants who can cope with social and economic issues and change, as well as the physical layout of the community.) Is it narrowly focused? Are you hiring consultants to validate what you already know and want? (The latter is fine, by the way; just be honest with yourselves and the consultant that this is what you are doing.)

2. Small is beautiful. In the case of planning consultants, usually the smaller, the better. In fact, a sole proprietor with no permanent employees may be a wonderful choice. Having led a consulting firm at various levels of staffing, I can say from experience that as more employees are involved, the percentage of the effort that goes into coordination, false starts, and repetitive work increases greatly. The flip side of that is that in theory a larger number of people would make better decisions because of a wider experience base.

But in general, if your neighborhood's issues are relatively common, a smaller firm or very small unit of a large firm will do a great job for you. In the interview process, though, make sure a sole proprietor has the capability for mapping, drawing, researching, interacting with the public and with key property owners, and anything else your project needs in addition to writing and thinking.

3. Access. Ask pointed questions about who you will actually see and work with. If the firm's office is out of town, be especially cautious. You don’t want to pay the travel bills (you will), unless you need really specialized expertise. Many local firms may have a particularly personable marketing point person, but you want to know whether the planners, engineers, or graphic designers you’ll be working with can communicate with you. If the main contact or contacts travel often, you'll have a different kind of access problem.

Be sure to ask what other projects the city planning consultants will be addressing during the same timeframe as you expect. Ask about their record of completing projects on time; planning projects notoriously spread beyond the allocated schedule.

4. Related experience. A consultant who has worked in your same neighborhood, city, or county almost inevitably can work more efficiently than someone new to your region. If they already have some knowledge of your geography, they will save both time and money, and therefore provide you with more detail. And certainly the firm's expertise in specialties you need will save them time and you the money that goes with the time.

Next, we invite you to share your story or question about hiring consultants, and last give some tips on how to supervise city planning consultants once they're on board.

City Planning Consultant Story to Share?

Has your organization employed a city planning consultant? How was it helpful? How did you control costs? Did you take the advice you paid for? What were the results?

Supervising City Planning Consultants

Again, your funder may play a very significant role in supervision of the project. In case you are so lucky as to be able to oversee the preparation of your plan yourself, though, here are a few tips:

1. Insist on periodic updates. City planning consultants have some tendency to work with minimal consultation, because consultation takes time and often causes changes of direction that are expensive for the consultant. However, from the community perspective, you want to know what they are thinking and why, whether they are on schedule or falling behind, the general conclusions they are drawing, and how and whether they are talking with the right players.

2. Draw clear lines of responsibility about who will present the ideas to the general public, and when. Your organization's community engagement style will determine whether you allow your membership or the general public to see the development of the ideas early and often, whether you present a finished product at the end and allow people a perfunctory opportunity to comment, or whether you set up two or three turning points in the project when public input will be allowed.

3. Communicate very clearly with your city planning consultants when you can see that they are leaning toward solutions that are politically unacceptable to you, local government leadership, or the community at large. Political considerations are as valid as physical constraints, and sometimes you will have to be very firm to deter designers who have fallen in love with a concept.

4. Insist on practicality. If a plan can't be implemented, it's not worthwhile. If solutions are well beyond your budget and no feasible fundraising methods have been proposed, you don't really have a plan. When your plan requires permission of state government and it's become clear that such permission won't be granted, again, you don't have a plan. Of course you should have set the stage for this conversation early in selecting your city planning consultants, but it's never too late to say the product isn't acceptable because it's not do-able.

An exception is when the consultant has done everything right to involve the permission-giver early, and yet there is a change of direction. Then you owe the fee to the consultant.

5. Devote some serious effort to writing a good description of the work to be performed. Hopefully this discussion has given you some insight into the many things that could go wrong when you hire city planning consultants. Don't run out of money before you have the product that you need. Be very clear in the work write-up (often called a scope of services, scope of work, or work plan) that you are seeking a plan that can be carried out, and that you need to have the plan spell out the next steps you need to take to make the plan a reality.

6. Become an informed and involved supervisor. Obtain an overview of the most important issues facing your neighborhood or community. Browse through our Sitemap to see if we provide a short review of those topics. You can improve the performance of planning consultants by asking them challenging questions, probing their assumptions, and making it clear that you're attempting to become more knowledgeable and realistic about your major question marks.

7. Consider how you can save money. You may be able to help with information gathering and community meetings, saving significant money. Your local government may be able to contribute mapping and data free; make sure your city planning consultants are taking advantage of what public and private entities in your community will provide at no cost. If you can, do some legwork for them. Focus your consulting money on judgments, drawings, mapping, and so forth you can't possibly do for yourselves.

And every day, more computer applications for mapping are available to the general public, so that reason for hiring a consultant may fade into the sunset.

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