DPW workers quit early, city says
Routine jobs incomplete, aides find
Five to 10 workers and supervisors in the city's Department of Public Works face discipline and could be fired, and dozens more are being questioned after an investigation by city officials revealed workers routinely left the job early and managers failed to ensure even basic pothole repairs were completed.
The operation included undercover surveillance by a private investigator hired by the city.
The disciplinary action comes more than a year after the Boston Finance Commission, a city watchdog agency, found that West Roxbury public works employees assigned to fill potholes, sweep streets, and pick up trash often arrived late, left early, and performed "very little work" while on the job.
A resulting city audit of four work sites and the headquarters of the department's highway division, completed in October, showed that little had changed since the watchdog agency's report, and that the problems were potentially more widespread and chronic.
The results of that audit compelled Chief of Public Works Dennis Royer to hire a private investigator to spy on his own employees. What the investigator saw over five weeks beginning last month, including employees falsifying co-workers' time sheets with the knowledge of their supervisors, has placed many city workers' jobs in jeopardy.
"The key things we're looking at are falsifying of records, insubordination, and untruthfulness," Royer said.
Employees assigned to the city's Brighton public works yard, the first target of the private investigator, will begin facing disciplinary proceedings Monday, city officials said. Employees at the East Boston yard and a third one, which city officials refused to name, are likely to face disciplinary hearings in the coming weeks.
The Globe obtained a copy of the results of the fall audit yesterday. Officials with KPMG, the Boston firm that conducts the city's annual financial audits, visited a district in West Roxbury, two districts in Roxbury, and one in East Boston. They also visited the city's highway division headquarters.
At two districts, auditors found that the clocks on fax machines - used to send time-stamped sign-in sheets to headquarters to verify supervisors arrived at work promptly at 7 a.m. - were set two hours slow. Also, the audit revealed that supervisors did not uniformly require advance approval of vacation time, made manual changes after the fact to categories of leave, and may have allowed employees to take more leave then they were due.
"This is a disturbing audit, and in some ways even more disturbing because almost a year ago the Boston Finance Commission issued a report that identified many of these same issues," said Sam Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. "And a year later we're discovering that the problem is probably even more serious. This is a real indictment of the operation of the department."
Royer said the auditor could not say for certain whether the time on the fax machines was intentionally set incorrectly to deceive senior managers.
"You can't say it was deliberate," Royer said. "Management should have corrected it,"
As a result of the audit, the city is now requiring supervisors to stamp their sign-in sheets with a machine whose time cannot be changed before faxing it to headquarters. Additionally, supervisors and managers must sign a form indicating they are verifying the sign-in information is accurate under penalty of perjury.
The audit also found problems with how public works employees are assigned simple tasks of street sweeping, emptying litter baskets, and patching potholes. It found the Public Works Department has no map of the city's more than 1,400 litter baskets, and some districts have no set schedule for emptying them.
The filling of potholes "appears to be a totally subjective decision of the supervisors and is unsupported by any records, data bases, or even a planned survey approach," the audit noted.
Royer acknowledged yesterday that the city does not have a policy for how potholes are identified, filled, and cataloged. Instead, crews drive around their districts searching for potholes and report at the end of the day an estimate of how much asphalt was poured. Royer said the city is working on "more sophisticated methodologies" for filling potholes.
After the audit, the Boston Finance Commission, whose report of problems with West Roxbury employees led to several being disciplined, returned to West Roxbury and several other public works yards to see whether changes had been made. The city's Department of Public Works joined in that surveillance, with the use of a private investigator, in March, Royer said.
"You make your observations and then at the back end you look at the daily attendance calendars to see whether or not what you observed in terms of personnel time and attendance is recorded accurately," said Jeffrey W. Conley, executive director of the Boston Finance Commission. "That's what we both did."
Royer said surveillance at West Roxbury showed improvements there. But surveillance in Brighton, East Boston, and the third site revealed many employees were falsely reporting the number of hours worked.
He said officials were still waiting to verify the results of the East Boston surveillance and had not begun verifying observations at the third site.
But because employees had been notified of proper procedures for reporting hours worked after the fall audit, their actions amounted to insubordination, he said.
"Our investigation shows there was a failure to follow work rules," he said.
John C. Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com. 