Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick on Thursday accused the city’s giant Department of Public Works of awarding its annual contracts without fully considering competing bids or exploring possible efficiencies.
Chick’s earlier audit of contracting at Los Angeles World Airports sparked criminal inquiries into whether contracts were traded for political donations. But the controller’s audit of the Department of Public Works did not uncover evidence of criminal conduct.
“This audit points to concerns in the areas of transparency, consistency, and fair and open competition in the Public Works’ contracting process,” Chick wrote in an open letter to elected officials. “The Board of Public Works needs to improve how it manages the awarding and monitoring of its contracts.”
The department is the city’s largest outside of police and fire, and awards more than $1 billion annually in contracts. Its responsibilities include garbage pickup, sewage treatment and street repair and construction.
The board, which overseas its operations, is appointed by Mayor James Hahn. Its president, Valerie Lynne Shaw, was on vacation and not available for comment, according to Cora Jackson Fossett, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works
However, Jackson Fossett noted that Chick’s criticisms were limited to relatively small contracts among the department’s $1 billion in annual contracting costs.
“The concerns that she brought up, we certainly are going to look into them,” said Jackson Fossett. “(But) we’re pleased that the dollar amounts she cited, which is $8 million, were little ones and not an across-the-board inconsistency.”
Chick’s audit faulted public works officials for failing to document its reasons for selecting some contractors, for inadequately managing contracts for some construction projects and for not justifying decisions to outsource work that could be done by city workers.
Chick said the public works board did not determine whether it was cost-efficient to outsource $6 million in annual contracts to truck haulers. The audit also criticized the board’s awarding of a waste-disposal contract without considering competing bids. Chick also said the department spends $2 million a year on outside contractors to trim trees, even though the department has city workers assigned to that task.
A private auditing firm hired by Chick’s office, Sjoberg-Evashenk Consulting LLC, concluded that the department had improved its contracting procedures in response to lawsuits from contractors denied work on the Hyperion Treatment Plant in the late 1990s. The city has paid out $16.3 million so far to satisfy those claims.
Fossett Jackson said the department has had to outsource some work such as tree trimming and trash hauling because of a citywide hiring freeze. But she said the department was open to any ideas on how to streamline contracting processes and to save money.
“Where we can implement changes and do them quickly, we’re going to move forward,” Fossett Jackson said.
