Crews contracted to maintain City of Toronto trees still taking ‘excessive’ breaks, says auditor’s review with surveillance video

Thestar.com
Feb. 9, 2021

Crews maintaining trees for the City of Toronto were covertly videotaped shopping, exercising and taking “excessive breaks” for an audit update that reveals they spent less than half their workdays tending trees.

Video shot for city Auditor General Beverly Romeo-Beehler between July 31 and Sept. 25, released in a follow-up to her scathing 2019 tree services audit, shows city and contracted workers on the job. Their faces and other identifiers are blurred.

Romeo-Beehler’s “limited scope follow-up review” made public Monday concludes: “More than 1.5 years since our original audit, concerns persist -- the City is still not receiving value-for-money for tree maintenance.”

The Auditor General released a report in 2019 that highlighted City management wasn't managing its tree maintenance crews very well. Parks Forestry and Recreation said it would vigorously take steps to meet the audit's recommendations. In July 2020, City Council asked the Auditor General to report further on forestry matters. Although some things have improved, many of the issues are still around -- more than a year and a half later.

Although city staff in 2019 vowed to root out the waste, more than 500 hours of “physical observations” by auditor staff found contracted crews on average spent only 3.5 hours -- less than half an eight-hour shift -- “actively working on trees.”

The rest of an average day was spent on: breaks not in their contracts; store and coffee shop visits; waiting in parked vehicles; driving and refuelling; and visiting yards to dump waste and other tasks.

Contracted tree workers visited one plaza so often their vehicles “were even captured by Google Maps’ Street View multiple times across many months … ,” the new report states.

After the April 2019 audit said GPS data revealed crews visiting coffee shops, malls and homes, contrary to activity logs and costing the city an estimated $2.6 million per year, the Parks, Forestry and Recreation (PFR) department addressed the issue in some “small ways,” the update says.

But PFR “needs to put more focus on systematically ensuring outcomes for tree maintenance, whether delivered through contracts or by City staff,” Romeo-Beehler wrote. “Strategic leadership in this area is key to moving PFR towards achieving better outcomes.

“A culture shift is needed … a more holistic view of how (the city) delivers tree maintenance services to make sure it is receiving value for money.”

Coun. Stephen Holyday, chair of the audit committee that will next week receive the update, told the Star: “I’m angry and I think other members of council are going to be just as upset” that waste has continued.

“Some of the issues raised are cultural in nature,” involving “oversight of these contractors and the city crews themselves,” he said -- an issue that requires “a larger degree of change.

“I’m not going to pick or select names but it’s my expectation for change right here, right now, today,” Holyday said.

Mayor John Tory, who in 2019 expressed outrage at the original audit, said Monday: “I’m very unhappy with (the new findings) and there needs to to be much more change, and I plan to involve myself as appropriate to ensure that change actually takes place.

“This situation … got a tiny bit better but it needed to get a lot better.”

Rather than rely on GPS data, Romeo-Beehler decided to have staff covertly watch tree crews from three city-hired firms. A “surveillance specialist” helped with the observation, which sometimes included the auditor general herself.

“This technique is normal when confronted with the type of risks identified in our 2019 audit,” the update states, noting the City of Hamilton in 2013 hired a private investigator to videotape public works staff when GPS data was deemed “suspicious.”

The tree maintenance video shows a worker with a shopping bag leaving a grocery store, another doing pushups outside and others sitting and looking at their phones.

Video images shot between July 31 and Sept. 25, 2020, for a City of Toronto auditor-general update that says the city needs to do a better job monitoring the work habits of crews contracted to do tree maintenance.

Scenes also raised safety concerns, including a worker in a raised bucket talking on his mobile phone while ducking under wires.

City staff said city tree maintenance contracts will be put out for tender in June.

“Given the potential for litigation in relation to this matter, we are limited to what we can say,” said city spokesperson Jasmine Patrick. “However, the City of Toronto welcomes and agrees with the Auditor General’s recommendations from the 2019 and 2021 audits on tree maintenance services.”

Multiple changes planned after the 2019 audit are underway, she said, adding “it was anticipated that it would take up to three years to fully implement these recommendations.”

Other audits released by Romeo-Beehler on Monday found that:

A consultant for a Business Improvement Area was arrested and charged with fraud. BIAs are associations of commercial property owners who get their money for a special property tax levy and are overseen by the city.
Tens of thousands of dollars were routed through the consultant’s bank account, raising a “high risk” of fraud. Some money was recovered, states a report that calls for better training of BIA officials.

The city needs to do more work to protect itself from hackers after a tip in early 2020 about “a cybersecurity incident” involving a new integrated human resources system with information about city employees and elected officials.
An unusually large number of users -- 90 in total -- had “super administrator” access to the HR system, implementation of which saw three “security incidents.”