Representatives from the San Diego city auditor‘s office told the City Council on Tuesday that the Public Utilities Department would need to more than triple its full-time staff just to keep up with new service requests for water meter covers and lids needing replacement.
As of December, the city had eight positions designated to fix faulty water meter covers and lids. The auditor’s office found that it would take roughly 28 full-time staffers just to keep up with the average number of new service requests per workday, which amounts to 47. Even more, employees would be needed to pare down the department’s current backlog.
“I hesitate to call this a good audit because that’s maybe not the right adjective,” said City Councilman Mark Kersey. “But it is a very instructive audit and there’s a lot of things in here that I think are very useful hopefully in showing us a way that things can be improved.”
According to PUD Deputy Chief Operating Officer Johnnie Perkins, the agency has a backlog of roughly 13,000 water meter covers and lids needing to be replaced. A PUD spokeswoman said that count is an adjustment on the department’s two previously reported backlogs of 25,000 and 19,000 work orders due to the removal of duplicated and triplicated work orders after the department made a number of field inspections.
“It just boggles my mind that we’re looking at these kinds of numbers,” said City Councilman Scott Sherman.
In addition to the staffing shortages, auditors found that the eight PUD employees replaced only a fraction of boxes and lids that could reasonably be expected due to a lack of management oversight and inefficiencies in the service request process. According to the report, the employees could have repaired 12 boxes and 20 lids on an average work day but only managed to fix four boxes and 15 lids per day.
“We’re taking appropriate action with our personnel and establishing and enforcing new performance standards, expectations and daily requirements,” Perkins said. “The expectation of all employees is that they complete a full day’s work. And as a city department, we are taking actions to ensure that this occurs and is the expectation of all employees.”
Former City Auditor Eduardo Luna, in a report last August, detailed how PUD employees took more than double the agency’s planned length of time to replace water meter cover lids and boxes. PUD crews replaced only one quarter of broken cover boxes and lids in fiscal year 2017 within the agency’s six- month goal. Of the other 75 percent, PUD fixed lids in an average of 11 months and boxes in an average of 20 months.
In addition to the long replacement times, the auditor’s office found that PUD employees spent an average of 3.6 hours in the field and roughly 2 1/2 hours to travel to work locations.
Perkins said the Public Utilities Department intends to send a report on the agency’s efforts to improve water meter cover and lid repair efficiency to the City Council’s Audit Committee before the end of the year.
— City News Service
