Three-Hundred Thousand Problems with Vision-Zero Consulting

Burlington residents are tired of hearing that safety is a top priority while watching their tax dollars disappear into the black hole of municipal consultancies. The recent Council approval of a $300,000 upset limit for yet another Vision Zero Road Safety Action Plan is the latest example of a government that prefers studying problems to solving them.

While our neighbors navigate dangerous intersections and cyclists risk their lives on painted lanes north of Highway 5, City Hall has decided that the best use of $300,000 from our Capital Purposes Reserve Fund isn't a shovel in the ground but instead a 200-page PDF delivered by a consultant. Perhaps the most egregious part of this expenditure is the timeline. The report isn't expected until Q4 2027. Think about that. We are being told that it will take nearly two years just to draft a plan.

By pushing the results into late 2027, this Council is effectively kicking the can past the 2026 municipal election. It is a classic bureaucratic deference of responsibility and avoidance of difficult decisions about road design. We don’t need two years of predictive modeling to know where the accidents are happening. We have the police data, the hospital records, and the grieving families who can point to the hot spots today.

Burlington City Council clearly doesn't feel that implementation of safety measures is that urgent, with a 2-year timeframe on consultancy and planning.

For the price of this one consultancy report, Burlington could have delivered immediate, tangible safety results. That $300,000 could have funded:

• 75 neighborhood speed humps to protect children in residential zones.

• 15 kilometers of quick-build protected bike lanes.

• Two high-visibility pedestrian crossovers with flashing beacons at known danger zones.

Instead, we are choosing to invest in a roadmap that will likely sit on a shelf until the next budget cycle, while the reserve fund money meant for actual infrastructure is raided to pay for intellectual busywork.

As this $300,000 contract goes out to tender, taxpayers deserve to know exactly who is getting the check. When the contract is awarded, we must look closely at the winners. Are these firms regular donors to municipal campaigns? Is this a reward for friends of the office or a genuine search for expertise? At a minimum, the city should be required to release the full scoring rubric and a list of all bidders to prove this isn't just business as usual at City Hall.

This brings us to ask the question: In a city of 200,000 people, why is our own highly paid Transportation Department staffed by professional engineers and planners unable to perform this work in-house? If we lack the internal expertise to plan our own streets, what exactly are we paying for in our annual operating budget?

We must also be realistic about the term "upset limit." In the world of municipal contracting, an upset limit of $300,000 is rarely viewed by a consultant as a maximum to stay under. History shows that these professional service contracts almost inevitably bill to the final penny. By the time the dust settles taxpayers should expect a final invoice for almost exactly $300,000.

Vision Zero is a noble goal, but zero should also apply to the number of wasteful consultancies we approve while our infrastructure lags behind. If we want to save lives, we need to stop auditing our streets and start fixing them. We have the collision data, we have the resident complaints, and we have the bodies on the road. We need shovels in the ground, not another 200-page PDF on a bureaucrat's desk. It’s time to stop spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell us it’s raining and start buying the umbrellas.