Toronto’s auditor general estimates $2.6M in potential loss of forestry contractors’ productivity

Toronto’s auditor general is sounding the alarm when it comes to the work forestry contractors are doing for the city, saying there could be $2.6 million in potential losses when it comes to the productivity of crews.

In a review to be considered by the City of Toronto’s audit committee on Friday, Beverly Romeo-Beehler and her office looked at the daily logs of 45 contractor crews in the city’s urban forestry section and compared the logs to the vehicles’ GPS records.

She wrote that 28 of those crews’ vehicles didn’t stop near the requested tree service location and/or the vehicles went to locations not recorded in the logs and unrelated to the tree service locations (examples included coffee shops and plazas).

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Looking at an average eight-hour shift, Romeo-Beehler found 2.8 hours of reported time lined up with GPS reports while 1.7 hours of reported work time couldn’t be validated. The rest of the time in that average shift was spent driving to locations, time in the yard, a break and other issues.

“This could mean that part of the eight-hour work paid by the City was not spent on City work-related activities. The estimated potential loss in productivity is approximately $2.6 million per year,” Romeo-Beehler’s report said, noting lost work in maintaining Toronto’s urban tree canopy could have big implications.

“If an inaccurate maintenance record is created for a tree in urban forestry’s system, this could have adverse long-term effects because it may be at least another seven years before the tree receives the next scheduled maintenance.”

According to the report, there are approximately 10.2-million trees in Toronto and the city spends around $20 million annually to three contractors for daily tree maintenance services.

Romeo-Beehler noted 97 per cent of storm cleanup requests, 90 per cent of tree pruning requests, 88 per cent of tree planting requests and 62 per cent of tree removal requests were done by crews within the current service standards.

When asked about the auditor general’s findings on Tuesday, Mayor John Tory said he was “very angry” and suggested the City of Toronto take immediate action.

“I think beyond obviously improving the degree to which we watch over these private contractors who supposedly do work for the city that we’ve got to go back after the ones that didn’t do work that they charged us for,” he said.

“And so to me, (we need) to take legal proceedings to recover some of that money and to take a look at whether some of these companies should be disqualified from doing business with us.”

CUPE Local 79 president Dave Mitchell, who represents unionized City of Toronto workers, told Global News in a statement that the organization is “deeply concerned” about the potential loss in productivity dollars.

“It is our position that public services are always better delivered by public workers,” he wrote.

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Romeo-Beehler made 10 recommendations to Toronto city council to address the issues raised in the audit, including regularly reviewing a sample of crews’ logs, considering the installation of GPS systems on vehicles used in the urban forestry section, and increasing the number of inspections.

— With files from Matthew Bingley