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Since 2011, ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ council has renewed and expanded contracts with private vendors for a range of basic public services, including garbage collection, litter pick-up, snow clearing, janitorial work, security guard services, tree pruning and sidewalk repair.

Lately, though, with Mayor Olivia Chow now calling the shots at city hall, the wisdom of the Fordian approach has finally started to get questioned.

Earlier this month, at a meeting of city hall’s infrastructure and environment committee, councillors showing that the cost of continuing to outsource garbage collection is soon likely to be significantly higher than just doing the job internally.

Based on an analysis of the new five-year deal signed with waste collection Green for Life (GFL), in 2031 the city will spend about $45.7 million to have GFL’s fleet of trucks collect trash in District 2, the area between the Humber River and Yonge Street. For comparison, the cost of having the city collect the same garbage with its own unionized employees is estimated at between $42.2 million and $44.4 million annually.

Over a five-year term — the typical contract length under the current outsourced arrangement — that’s a chance to bag between $6.5 million and $17.5 million in total savings.

The city’s cost estimate for in-sourcing, validated by an independent consultant, factors in the cost of buying a whole new fleet of trucks and procuring new yard space to process the waste. And the projected savings come even as city workers make significantly more than the workers employed by the private vendors.

Those numbers alone should probably be enough to prompt a vibe shift contrary to Ford’s ancient wisdom — but wait, there’s more.

The infrastructure committee also . An analysis found that bringing the litter vacuum program in-house, with city-owned equipment and city workers sucking up the trash, would save about $1.8 million over five years.

Those are relatively small savings, but they also come with the promise of better service.

“Our view is that when city staff are doing the work, there is a higher duty of care that’s provided, and the staff will go above and beyond what’s typically in the job description,� explained Matt Keliher, the city’s longtime general manager of solid waste, at the committee meeting. “Whereas when we have contractors, we contract them to do a specific job, a specific route, a specific time, and we pay them for that role.�

That distinction has played a role in a lot of the stories we’ve heard about city hall’s struggles of late.

The ability to effectively respond to major blizzards has been put on thin ice by the finer points of contracts signed with the corporate consortium responsible for operating the snow plows. Last year, a report found that the private companies contracted to prune city trees generate way more complaints than city crews. And the city’s contract to outsource supply and maintenance of on-street garbage bins, hailed as an “extraordinary opportunity� when it was signed, has delivered famously frustrating results, with the supplied bins often packed to overflow and prone to failure.

Some of the blame is on the city. Many departments have never been great at contract management, too often trying to rewrite agreements midstream and not anticipating how needs might change over the course of a long-term deal.

But a bigger problem might simply be that there’s a fundamental mismatch between the complex and changing needs of a big city like ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ and the capacity of the private sector in some important service areas.

The idea that there are always lots of private bidders ready to compete with each other to deliver public services at low prices has never really borne out. The latest contract for garbage collection in District 2, for example, . GFL’s winning bid came despite an eye-popping 98 per cent annual increase over its previous contract for equivalent service.

A similar pattern has emerged across a lot of other city procurement: few qualified bids and escalating prices.

How Chow and ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ council will adjust remains to be seen. Council is set to vote at its meeting this week on whether to bring litter collection back in-house. A vote on whether to start bringing more garbage collection back into the hands of the public sector will come much later, after staff conduct more analysis of the costs. These moves and others to give more responsibility to public sector unions have to be weighed against the possibility of labour disputes, like the one that led to ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½â€™s very stinky garbage strike in 2009.

But there’s good reason to consider a departure from the old Ford ethos, where public services are best delivered by private companies. Maybe ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ needs to aim higher than the lowest bidder.