City audit: $5.6M in funds unnoticed by public works

Baltimore agency directs unused cash to landfill upgrades

For more than a decade, Baltimore’s Department of Public Works allowed millions of dollars in needed funding to go unnoticed and unused, a city audit found.

Roughly $5.6 million in revenue sat on the department’s books between 2007 and last year, according to the audit released Wednesday at a meeting of the city’s spending board. The money came from citations issued by the Sanitation and Enforcement Division.

The public works department — which oversees waste removal, recycling and water distribution — “did not have a process to review the general ledger to validate account activities and account balances,” the report said. That meant officials were “unaware of revenue which was available for use.”

City Auditor Josh Pasch told the Board of Estimates that the public works agency must perform periodic account analysis to ensure “things don’t slip through the cracks.”

After city officials flagged the issue, the majority of the funding was directed toward improvements at the city’s Quarantine Road Landfill.

“Those funds have now been released,” Pasch said.

Agency leaders said Wednesday they had to use the money identified through the audit to help bring the landfill into compliance with state and city codes, after the facility received multiple violations for problems with erosion controls and stormwater management.

But Democratic City Councilman Bill Henry said the department should have demonstrated more transparency in dispersing the funds, especially because the city’s water infrastructure is in desperate need of repair.

“I understand that our long-term solid waste management plan and our landfill are important priorities, and so I’ve requested additional information on how the decision was made to transfer the surplus funds for these projects, and not for any other DPW priority — like our water infrastructure or our longpromised composting center,” he said in a statement.

Henry, who is running for city comptroller, the office that oversees audits, previously criticized the audit process because this biennial report was two weeks overdue. Democratic Comptroller Joan Pratt said she had to offer the agency time to accept the findings or to “clarify or refute” them.

“It wasn’t late due to the Department of Audits, it was late due to the Department of Public Works getting responses back,” she said.

The report also identified problems at the landfills. There weren’t working camera systems in place to detect suspicious activity, such as scavengers removing materials. There were also no controls to keep employees from taking scrap metal or other items out of the landfill. Internet outages at disposal sites hampered operations, auditors found, and led to longer wait times for residents and debris haulers.

Department officials said they’ve taken steps toward addressing these issues, including soliciting proposals for installing cameras. The plans will be approved when they can secure funding, the audit report said.

Democratic Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young last month asked for a separate audit of the Department of Public Works’ water billing system after discovering the city failed for more than a decade to collect a total of $2.3 million from the high-end Ritz Carlton Residences along the Inner Harbor.

“It goes back to cleaning up the system,” Young said, “so we can make sure we know where every dollar is.”

A spokesman for the mayor said the audit’s findings are unrelated to the recently announced retirement of longtime Public Works Director Rudy Chow.