New city trucks a bad fit for plowing duty, auditor finds

The City of Ottawa had to buy six new trucks after the ones it initially purchased were unable to handle the weight of the plows they were meant to push, the city's auditor has found.

It was just one of several examples of wasteful municipal spending Ken Hughes described Thursday in hisreport on the 190 anonymous tips submittedtothe municipalfraud and waste hotline in 2018.

The trucksin question were purchased for OC Transpo to clear snow and spreadsalt at the transit agency's yards, but the city soon learned the attachments didn't fit.

"The vehicles' front axles were overloaded and the vehicles couldn't perform the work that they were purchased for," Hughes said.

The city reassigned those trucks and bought new ones. Removing the plows and installing them on new truckscost the city $82,000, Hughes said.

Among the other examples of fraud or waste that Hughes and his team discovered:

• Two employees were regularly smoking cannabis in a cityvehicle during work hours. They were fired. While their behaviour was discovered before cannabis was legalized last October, Hughes said the employeeswould still have lost their jobs today.
• An employee stole $1,100 in cash. That person has resigned and has agreed to a settlement to reimburse the city.
• The city continued to pay $86,000 to a pensioner before it was advisedthat the former employee had died. Repayments have begun.
• A manager who violated city policies by hiringfamily members received a warning letter.All supervisors will get refresher training on recruiting and hiring standards.

Build new family shelter, auditor urges

The auditor released a separate report Thursday on his investigationinto how the city uses motels as emergency shelters.

Hughesfound the number of families staying in motels had grownfrom 92 in 2016, to 181 in 2017, to 219 last year. There are currently 282 families sheltered in hotels and motels across the city.

• City weighing new family shelter at auditor's urging
• No vacancy: More families placed in hotels as demand for shelter surges

To house those families, thecity spent $9.3 million in 2018, of which 41 per cent went to a single motel.The families spent an average of fourmonths in a single-room unit with no kitchen, at an average cost to the city of $3,000 per month.

The city has one shelter for homeless families on Carling Avenue, but recently closed another shelter on Forward Avenue.

In his report, the auditor urged the city to look at building a new shelter to house homeless families, something the city plans to do by next year.

The auditteam also looked at how $1,360 disappeared from a safe at Meridian Theatre at Centrepointe in early November 2018.

There was no security camera watching over the safe, so police and corporate security were unable to identify the thief.The safe has since been moved to an area of the theatre that's undervideo surveillance.