$244K Today, $1.8 Million Tomorrow

The public sees one number. The vendor gets another. And the Legislature doesn’t get a second vote.

When a legislature votes on a contract with a dollar amount attached, you’d think that’s the full cost of the service.

Not in the Monroe County Legislature.

At Tuesday’s Ways and Means Committee meeting, we were asked to approve two design contracts: one to pay C&S Engineers $244,300 for work on the MCC Downtown Campus Career Center project, and another to pay Popli Design Group $29,945 for renovations at the County Clerk’s Office.¹

But those amounts are just a fraction of what these firms will ultimately be paid.

The administration told us that the $244,300 for C&S is for schematic design—2% of the project’s total capital budget. They expect design to cost 10% to 15% overall. That means C&S Engineers could eventually receive more than $1.8 million.

Similarly, Popli Design Group is expected to receive around 10% of the County Clerk renovation project’s $2.5 million budget—far above the $29,945 we were asked to approve.

Nowhere in the resolutions does it state the final cost.²

And here’s the kicker: the Legislature won’t vote on those additional funds.

That’s because the resolutions have a clause allowing the administration to add amendments as long as capital funds are available. That means vendors can receive vastly more than what we approve on paper – without a single additional vote.

According to the administration, once the schematic designs are done, the vendor will submit another proposal to complete the rest of the design work, but that larger payment won’t come back to us for approval. It’ll be handled administratively, without legislative oversight.

Why? Here's what an administration official told me when I asked:

“So from a fiscal responsibility it’s more important to us to spend the money we need rather than asking for a bunch of money and then not spending it… We feel that we’re professional enough to develop the project and design that doesn’t need constant oversight for us to complete the allocation of the design within the allocation of the project.”

In other words, trust us, we’ve got this.

Another legislator asked whether requiring another legislative vote would delay projects.

Unsurprisingly, the administration said yes, of course it would. Giving the Legislature more oversight, they argued, would slow things down.

This practice has already cost us—millions.

In 2015, the Legislature approved a $266,678 contract with a design firm for a Seneca Park Zoo project. But the resolution included that same clause allowing the administration to amend the contract without coming back to us, as long as capital funds were available.

What happened next? Successive administrations quietly issued amendment after amendment, and the final bill ballooned to more than $6 million.

For what? An unusable design that had to be scrapped.

It wasn’t technically a blank check, but on a large project with a big capital allocation, it might as well have been. We were completely bypassed. And we ended up wasting millions of dollars with zero accountability.

This isn’t a one-off mistake or an oversight. It’s standard operating procedure.

Once again, we’re approving small initial contracts without knowing the true cost, and the administration is reserving the right to expand those contracts later without further legislative approval. That’s how we end up with million-dollar payouts that were never fully debated or publicly disclosed at the outset.

Here’s what should happen.

At a minimum, every resolution should state the total anticipated cost of the project and how much the vendor is expected to receive when all is said and done. Ideally, the Legislature should authorize the full amount up front. If the administration doesn’t spend the entire allocation, no harm is done. But at least we’d have a clear, honest picture of what we’re actually voting on.

Right now, we don’t. The resolutions are shockingly incomplete. They routinely omit essential information, forcing legislators to dig through past votes or ask basic questions in committee just to understand the full scope of a project. That’s not good governance.

I understand this is how things have been done for years. I don’t believe there’s ill intent. But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. It needs to change.

These are simple, reasonable fixes that would improve transparency and accountability without placing a burden on the administration.

The public deserves clarity on how their money is spent. Legislators deserve the full story before they vote. Anything less is a failure of oversight.

1. You can read the resolutions here: Click on 25-0156 and 25-0157.

2. The resolutions do state the legislature approved the total project amounts in 2024, and lists the resolution numbers. But then legislators and members of the public would have to go back to that resolution for the project amount (our website is horrendous for looking up past resolutions) and calculate the estimated final cost of the design based on the industry standard of 10% to 15%. That’s not reasonable or transparent.