TORONTO -- Video released Tuesday from Toronto’s top auditor demonstrated that in addition to spending hours sitting around while billing taxpayers for work, tree maintenance workers were continuously caught on camera breaching basic safety standards.
In the surveillance footage recorded by investigators, including the Auditor General herself, the contractors are repeatedly seen hauling down large branches without wearing a hard hat or other protective gear, dodging overhead wires while talking on a cell phone in the bucket of a boom truck, and unsafely using the wood chipper.
“Let’s fix this together,” Auditor General Beverly Romeo-Beehler told the audit committee Tuesday. “Everybody’s going to benefit. All you want is the trees to be done.”
Romeo-Beehler’s team spent 500 hours surveilling the maintenance crews as part of a follow-up to a 2019 investigation that revealed that the workers’ GPS coordinates often matched coffee shops and plazas instead of job sites when they purported to be working on trees. The estimated lost productivity was pegged at $2.6 million.
READ MORE: Audit finds private tree contractors still charging taxpayers for work never performed
The follow-up investigation though revealed little progress. The audit team witnessed crews passing hours sitting, talking, smoking, reading, and exercising—spending an average of just three-and-a-half hours of their eight-hour day working on trees, including all set-up, clean-up, and paperwork.
“We gave the benefit of the doubt to the contractor in relation to anything they were doing in relation to the job, even putting on boots on the site,” Romeo-Beehler said.
City staff told the committee that in the wake of the 2019 findings, they had improved the correlation of daily work logs to GPS records and updated the terms and obligations of the 2021 contracts, among other things.
“It’s now become aware through the surveillance that certainly that isn’t enough,” Janie Romoff, General Manager of the city’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation, acknowledged.
The audit team reported that city crews were also discovered to have violated safety protocols and file questionable work logs.
“We will have to work more vigorously to ensure that the vendors and city crews are working as efficiently as possible,” Romoff said.
Staff are pledging to enforce expectations for contractor conduct and safety, implement a system of photo documentation, and conduct more physical surveillance of tree maintenance crews.
“Once in a while, somebody’s going to go out there and look with their two eyes and maybe they’re in parked car in a disguise,” audit chair Stephen Holyday said.
