The DPW is Doing a Heckuva Job

A new report on the Department of Public Works just came out and it's pretty much not good. Kind of damning, actually. The basic gist of it as that they're spending way more money than they're taking in for not a whole lot of work. Basically, they're not cleaning up graffiti, not pruning trees, and not fixing pot holes. Of, if they are, they're spending way more money than they should in fixing them.

For example, there's tree pruning, something of importance considering Gavin's plans to go around and plant trees everywhere. Trees are supposed to be pruned every three years. They're pruned every seven. But because they're not being pruned, they keep on falling on top of things that don't take having trees fall on top of it well so the city is having to shell out about $1.6 million to settle claims. 58% of the claims made to the DPW are in regards to falling trees.

As for cleaning things, almost 19 percent of all street cleaning and 68% of graffiti claims were not taken care of within 48 hours.

Part of the problem seems to be in figuring out the contracts to all of it. According to the report, it took an extra 781 days and 25% of its budget to implement the Cesar Chavez Street Improvement Project in 2004 due to contract changes.

As for the DPW, they basically said "tell us something we don't know" and are working to fix it. Considering we're in an election year and a Certain Someone is going to focus on Quality of Life issues, we're guessing we're going to be hearing a lot about this over the next year or so.