Nine months after the late Mayor D. Michael Collins announced he would conduct a detailed financial audit of the city’s utilities department, Toledo City Council approved spending $55,000 for a firm to perform the review.
Council voted 11-0 to hire The PFM Group of Ann Arbor for consulting and to conduct the audit. Councilman Tyrone Riley was not present.
Mayor Collins in late January said he would order the audit. The announcement came on the heels of a scathing performance audit report blasting the city’s public utilities department for multiple issues, including lax safety, inefficient operations, bloated management, and low cash reserves.
Also in January, a confidential 2013 letter obtained by The Blade, which was written by a high-ranking, outgoing Bell administration official, highlighted major accounting irregularities within the department.
Councilman Lindsay Webb, chairman of council's utilities committee, said she recently inquired why the audit had not yet been approved.
The 164-page performance audit report, written by Schumaker & Co. of Ann Arbor, found that the city had no strategic plan, above-average rates of workplace injuries, below-market management salaries, supervisors who don’t actually supervise anyone, an inefficient water department customer call center, a large backlog of work orders, a sluggish water main and sewer line replacement program, and a litany of other problems.
A reorganization of the department since then shuffled some managers into different positions but still retained roughly the same number of managers.
In other business, council delayed voting on a controversial proposal to change a 92-year-old law that requires a supermajority to overrule a city plan commission disapproval.
Six councilmen — Tom Waniewski, Rob Ludeman, Matt Cherry, Lindsay Webb, Larry Sykes, and Mike Craig - have pledged to vote in favor of changing part of the Toledo Municipal Code from 1923 that requires a three-fourths vote of city council to overturn a plan commission disapproval. If approved, it would require a simple majority, or only seven votes.
Council’s committee of the whole is expected to debate the issue but a date was not set.
Council also voted 11-0 to approve the issuance and sale of up to $1,275,000 of notes to pay for sidewalks.
Contact Ignazio Messina at: imessina@theblade.com or 419-724-6171 or on Twitter @IgnazioMessina.
First Published September 2, 2015, 4:00 a.m.
