Baltimore County IG: Department of Public Works failed to supervise employees who exaggerated work time

The Baltimore County Department of Public Works and Transportation failed to adequately supervise grinder pump work crews, allowing a handful of employees to exaggerate the number of hours they worked, while going days without completing necessary sewage work, according to a report published by the Office of Inspector General Kelly Madigan.

Madigan’s report focused on five employees assigned to three service trucks in the grinder pump section of the Bureau of Utilities’ Pumping and Treatment Division, who spent approximately a third or more of their average workday sitting in their trucks for “excessive amounts of time” at “locations that did not appear to be work-related,” and at times, going “entire days without completing a work order.”

The Department of Public Works and Transportation employs 85 people within the division who are responsible for maintaining and operating more than 100 sewer pumping stations and 2,400 grinder pumps.

The grinder pumps must undergo preventive maintenance checks every three years. Failure to do so could lead to fines from the state and federal governments, Madigan wrote in her recently released report, which is dated July 19.

Baltimore County has been under a federal sewage consent decree since 2005 that requires updates to its aging sewer infrastructure.

Madigan’s investigation found that despite their trucks being outfitted with a vehicle tracking software, DPW managers failed to notice that employees were excessively idling at areas where they didn’t have duties.

“This was despite there being no shortage of work to be done in the Grinder Pump Section during that time frame, as told to the office by several employees,” Madigan wrote.

The three crews spent, on average, 81.3%, 45.6%, and 45.6% of their workdays in January, February and March, respectively, not completing work orders, Madigan’s office found. One day in February, two of the workers reported working six hours on various work orders, when they only worked for an hour, according to data collected during the investigation.

“On some occasions, the employees intentionally entered incorrect data on their work orders to compensate for days when they performed little or no work,” the report said.

DPW employees in the grinder pump section also reported being reluctant to adapt or not being trained in how to log their work time in the new CityWorks software, which is used to create work orders. Only one administrative employee was able to create work orders for that section, according to the report.

Madigan’s office found the investigated employees’ work orders “were frequently inaccurate, a number of [them] had been outstanding for an extended period of time, and no one from the division” was ensuring they were completed in a timely manner.

In the county’s Aug. 16 response, County Administrative Officer Stacy Rodgers said the Department of Public Works provided training to supervisors, issued new standard operating procedures effective Aug. 14, and would offer retraining to employees by January.

The department’s vehicle tracking system and work order tracking systems were designed to perform different functions, and weren’t meant to be used together to track employees’ movements or corroborate how many work orders they completed, Rodgers wrote. Instead, the department’s policy lists that employees’ work orders must be able to match vehicle tracking information for a “given day,” she said.

The county is working to create a report tallying outstanding work orders, Rodgers said.