Calgary street light repair took 4x more time than contract KPIs: Audit

Calgary's street light renovations took 450 percent longer than the contract baseline, according to a newly released audit report.

Lengthy repair delays are something a Calgary city councilor says he's heard about almost every day since being elected to office.

The report comes before the City of Calgary's Audit Committee meeting on May 23 and calls for a special contract monitoring process to manage the maintenance of the city's more than 105,000 streetlights. The cost of the replacement is over $1.9 billion.

“Current service priorities and escalation processes do not support the timely repair of the most urgent outages and require revision,” the city auditor's office report said. The audit said it affects mobility, safety and crime prevention in Calgary.

During the audit period, corrective maintenance response times exceeded contractual KPIs by more than 400 percent, the report said. They also said the work management system in use lacked sufficient data to support effective repair operations or contract management.

The City of Calgary said it is taking steps to clear the backlog caused by hiring a new contractor for the service last September. The city returned that contract in November 2022. Enmax has attended service calls before.

The audit period was from July 2022 to June 2023.

7th District. Terry Wong said it's not just inner-city communities that need infrastructure that is much older and in need of repair. It's happening all over Calgary.

“The new contract is about a year old and we are still suffering from delays,” he said.

The audit also found inconsistent details in relevant work orders for street lighting, with less than two per cent containing “severe” warning notes, rising to 4.42 per cent for enhanced work. Overall, only 269 of the 1,314 work requests had crew alerts, making “effective cost analysis and resource management difficult,” the audit report said.

Challenges and suggestions

Number. According to Wong, most service requests fall into two categories: light bulb repair or underground wiring or junction box. The latter would take longer to repair because of the potential need to plow up land to reach utilities, he said.

Explaining this to Calgarians will help them understand why some issues take longer than others, Wong said.

“I've asked (the administrator) to change the reporting system so that if a light goes out, it shows it that way and turns it off after it's fixed,” Kuhn said. Wong said.

“If it's a real switch, a transformer or something in this directive, change the layout so people know it's been reported and it's definitely taking longer to do, so the public isn't just saying our service times are slow. »

The audit report makes a number of recommendations, including remediation priorities and a review of the escalation response process.

He also said the current contract monitoring process does not meet contract requirements. The report found that the contractor performed safety, insurance, and other areas of risk assessment, but failed to meet planning, mitigation, and implementation warning requirements.

They also want to address the data collection issue, noting that 311 service requests are not included in the contractor's work management tools, which affects the accuracy of service times. Also, no information was collected on repair time, nature of work, or speed of repair.

“Inaccurate/incomplete information can limit the ability to analyze costs, rate repair times or prioritize maintenance activities, and limit analytical capabilities that support informed decision making,” the audit report said.

Management agreed to the report's recommendations, with plans to complete the work by December 2025.

There is progress

The inquiry heard that mobility director Troy McLeod had reduced 5,000 requests for street light repairs to 500 over the past few months. McLeod noted that the turnover of contractors has resulted in a large backlog.

“Now we've got it down to less than 500, and across the city we're just over 99 percent online, like the street lights, so our response has gone up a lot,” he said.

While they're working with the main contractor, the city said it's also starting to work with smaller contractors to fill in and provide Calgarians with an edge in adequate service.

8th district. According to Courtney Walcott, the difficulty with audit reports is that they take a certain amount of time and do not always reflect some of the challenges faced by business units out of scope. When he first read the report, he was surprised by the delays, but then recalled some of the hurdles he faces when dealing with street light service requests to the City of Calgary.

“We're the first port of call in the storm, and my office has gotten a lot of these questions, and I've gotten a lot of responses over the last couple of years about some of these challenges,” Walcott said.

The administrator confirmed that there have been several major outages during this time, some requiring underground wiring and others requiring complete pole replacement.

They added that they see a demand of 700 to 800 street light services per month. They said they can accommodate a response time of 10-14 days when they have less than 500 job requests.

Citizens can report street light outages online.