City of Ballarat's CEO is determined to reform procurement and improve transparency

Having successfully overseen the creation and implementation of the council's new procurement policy and steered it through chambers, he's now turning his mind to the future of the city's workforce post-COVID - if that future ever seemingly materialises.

Balancing the rise of flexible working arrangements when many staff lack the opportunity to be flexible, because their roles cannot facilitate working from home, risks creating a workplace divide, King says.

"From a workforce perspective, it's fascinating around flexible working arrangements and working from home: how do you balance that in an organisation where probably 80 per cent of the organisation has no capacity to be flexible?" King asks.

"Just from the cultural perspective: how do you build an organisational culture? How do you break down silos when people are working from home? Yet it will become a point of difference from a recruitment perspective.

"Some of the small rural councils are saying they can't find anyone. They are saying (for example) 'having a strategic planner in Queensland is better than not having one at all.'"

The trend towards outsourcing roles within councils struggling to attract staff means risking a loss of local knowledge, he says, and therefore inviting ratepayer criticism, which, he observes drily, is already given quite freely and usually without being sought.

"Even when you've got people on-site and living close by, quite often there's still criticism of that local knowledge. If you've got someone that's in Queensland doing strategic planning, I just don't know how those jobs are done from a desktop.

"You've got to be careful in the end, because it's almost one step towards complete outsourcing: if I can have someone in Queensland, why can't I have someone in, say, Indonesia or somewhere doing it? Where does it end up?"

King has recently completed the implementation of council's new procurement policy, on the back of the Pitcher Partner audit of September 2020, released in 2021, the Local Government Inspectorate's recommendations regarding the changes the City of Ballarat needed to make to purchasing, project management and contracting practices, and the IBAC Special report on corruption risks associated with procurement in local government of 2019, which followed The Courier's revelations of fraudulent accounting within council.

The Courier's reporting of overspends on two projects, the Gatekeeper's Cottage and Fernery at the Botanic Gardens, and forensic examination of councillor expenses were also the catalyst for the initiation of the Pitcher Partner report.

Evan King says he is determined to reinstate a sense of responsibility to the ratepayer within the City of Ballarat's practices, fiscally and prudentially.

"Because we're dealing with public money, in the end we should be scrutinised, and we shouldn't be scared of being scrutinised," he says.

"If we do everything to a high standard, then we should welcome scrutiny - I say that all the time. People get concerned about audits and those sorts of things - you've got to embrace audits in the in the end; it's important. They're coming in to check our controls and processes, to make sure that we're spending money appropriately, and (ensure) we've got the right rigour in our processes.

"It's always a continuous improvement exercise, you're never perfect at everything in the end. So I don't run away from the scrutiny at all. I think it's important when you're not dealing with your own money."

The CEO says while the reports found audit processes did exist at council, there was a lack of control of auditing, and a lack of willingness to monitor the control of procurement processes.

READ MORE:

"For many of those processes, the existence, there was probably in places a lack of controls, and lack of monitoring some of those controls to make sure that they were being followed. I mean, they wouldn't have done those reports if everything was being followed. It'd be silly for me to sit here and say, 'Yes they had all the controls, and they were all being followed, because we just had an audit that suggested they weren't."

King says the new procurement policy will give clarity to council's officers about how to approach project management with impartiality and openness, a clarity which is obviously supported by the Local Government Inspectorate.

"They've come back and said they support the recommendations around management's needs to ensure procurement processes and project management is improved.

"They've identified some weaknesses in how we procure and how we manage projects, so we've been doing significant work on implementing new and improved processes around both procurement and project management."

While Evan King says he hasn't met resistance to his belief in transparency and accountability, changing an established culture is still hard.

"What I encountered,I suppose, is that the organisation has done things a certain way, and have believed that's the right way. And I've come in and said it, 'No, this is how that should happen.'"

If you are seeing this message you are a loyal digital subscriber to The Courier, as we made this story available only to subscribers. Thank you very much for your support and allowing us to continue telling Ballarat's story. We appreciate your support of journalism in our great city.