The city's Department of Public Works is a mess, with a city-funded private investigator reporting that workers routinely showed up late, left early, and falsified time sheets with their supervisors' knowledge. The new report comes more than a year after similar findings from an investigation of the DPW by the Boston Finance Commission, a city watchdog agency.
Such breaches of the public trust, which may now result in disciplinary hearings involving dozens of the department's 375 employees, are bad enough. But perhaps even more troubling than reports of city workers skipping out on their duties is the picture of what goes on when they are actually on the job.
An outside audit of DPW operations conducted last fall, which the Globe obtained a copy of and reported on last month, found that the department has no map of the 1,400 litter baskets positioned throughout the city, with no schedule for emptying them in some areas of town. The audit also reported that filling potholes "appears to be a totally subjective decision of supervisors and is unsupported by any records, databases, or even a planned survey approach." Dennis Royer, the city's DPW commissioner, acknowledged the haphazard approach to such road hazards, saying crews drive around their districts looking for potholes in need of a patch. He said the city is working on developing a more systematic approach to potholes.
For an administration that has tried to build its reputation on nuts-and-bolts attention to basic city services, it's a dismal report card. But it may not be one that should be that surprising.
It was in 1994, a year after assuming office, that Mayor Tom Menino was branded "the urban mechanic" in a Globe magazine story by John Powers. The article opens by describing a stack of 3-by-5 index cards clipped to the windshield of the mayor's official car, ready for him to jot down the location of a pothole or streetlight that needs fixing. An aide describes the string of mayoral marching orders during his morning commute from Hyde Park to City Hall: "He'll call 10 times from 10 different corners."
It's an engaging portrait of a hands-on city leader. It's a less compelling model for management of big-city departments.
"I sort of winced when I saw in the audit that they're just driving around and there's no systematic approach to checking roads and identifying potholes," says Sam Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau. As for the alleged complicity of supervisors in fudging time sheets of DPW workers, Tyler says he immediately thought of a 2007 audit of the Fire Department that criticized its operations for having no formal training for managers and supervisors. "That could apply to a lot of city departments," says Tyler.
Meanwhile, as cities across the country, including neighboring Somerville, have embraced the "CitiStat" model for reporting and tracking constituent service calls, Boston has dragged its feet at joining the effort to introduce transparency and accountability to the delivery of city services. Two years after vowing to implement such a system, city officials now say it could take until 2010 to put everything in place. Even that pledge comes with a catch, as the mayor stubbornly refuses to offer residents the simple three-digit phone number, 311, used in other cities to handle nonemergency calls.
Figuring out what number to call to report a pothole shouldn't be a mystery. Having confidence it might get filled even without a complaint call should involve more than blind faith.
Michael Jonas can be reached at jonas@globe.com.
