Audit Report On The Department Of Parks And Recreation’s Trees & Sidewalks Program

Executive Summary

We conducted this audit to determine whether the New York City (City) Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) has adequate controls over its Trees & Sidewalks Program to ensure sidewalks are repaired in a timely manner.

DPR’s mission is to plan, maintain, and care for the more than 30,000-acre municipal parks system that encompasses over 1,900 parks, 1,000 playgrounds, 650,000 street trees, and 2 million park trees.  In connection with its responsibility for street trees, DPR manages the Trees & Sidewalks Program, initiated in March 2005, which seeks to repair sidewalks damaged by the roots of City trees in front of owner occupied one-, two-, and three-family homes (property tax class 1) not used for commercial purposes.  The mission of the program is to preserve the integrity of the trees, address any potential tree-related safety concerns, and reduce liability of the City and owners of adjacent private property.

According to DPR’s procedures, the sidewalk repair process is initiated when an individual makes a request by either calling 3-1-1, entering information into the 3-1-1 website, or entering a request into DPR’s website.  All requests received under the Trees & Sidewalks Program for a sidewalk inspection should be entered into DPR’s Forestry Management System (ForMS) 2.0.  DPR’s staff should review the service request to ensure that the address is eligible for the Trees & Sidewalks Program and check ForMS 2.0 to determine whether it contains a record of any other complaints at that address.  According to DPR’s internal standard, known as the Service Level Agreement (SLA), an inspector should evaluate each eligible site within 30 days and assign a priority rating.  For each sidewalk that receives a priority rating above DPR’s threshold, DPR is supposed to create a repair design and subsequently generate a corresponding work order.  Once DPR has a budget and a contract to complete sidewalk repairs, its procedures call for it to identify those sidewalks with work orders within a geographic area to be repaired by the contractor.

Audit Findings and Conclusions

This audit found that DPR had inadequate controls over its Trees & Sidewalks Program to ensure that sidewalks are repaired in a timely manner.  DPR has a weekly Trees and Sidewalks Indicator Report that contains various activity and performance measures; however, it does not track the timeliness with which the sidewalks are inspected or repaired.  Our review of 11,392 service requests and 9,118 associated addresses found that homeowners had to wait an average of 101 days after submitting a request to have their sidewalks inspected, 71 days longer than the 30 day internal DPR SLA.  Additionally, our review of 1,069 repaired sidewalks found that the average time from inspection to repair was 419 days, with the longest time for a repair taking over 11 years.  DPR’s data reveals that 95 percent of the sidewalk repairs were completed within 2 years and 98 percent were completed within 2.5 years.  According to DPR officials, the Trees & Sidewalks Program does not have a target time frame for how long it should take for a sidewalk scoring above the priority rating threshold to be repaired following an inspection.

In addition, we found that no data was recorded within the inspection fields in ForMS 2.0 for 1,527 service requests (associated with 1,509 unique addresses).  According to DPR, no inspection record was generated for these service requests.  For many of them, the only indication that an inspection may have been performed is in the service request Notes to Customer field; however, there are no supporting details (e.g., inspection identification number, date, sidewalk rating, or inspector’s name) to provide a clear indication that an inspection was actually performed.  This includes 143 service requests (associated with 141 unique addresses), where the Notes to Customer field either contained no information at all or contained information that did not pertain to the complaint.

We also found that DPR did not consistently label service requests as duplicates when it received multiple service requests for the same address; we reviewed 6,446 service requests, associated with 2,706 unique addresses, each of which had two or more service requests recorded in ForMS 2.0, and found that 1,494 service requests were not identified as duplicates by DPR.  Of these, 187 addresses received two or more inspections.  Additionally, of the 2,741 service requests in ForMS 2.0 that we reviewed and that were marked as duplicates, we were unable to find additional service requests for 72 of them.

Audit Recommendations

Based on our findings, we make seven recommendations, including the following:

• DPR should incorporate additional timeliness metrics for the Trees & Sidewalks Program, including for inspections, into its internal management reports.
• DPR should include a new step when completing inspections to record all relevant information in the appropriate inspection fields and to identify any address that is ineligible for the Trees & Sidewalks Program with the reason why the site is ineligible.
• DPR should ensure that the Forestry staff performing Trees & Sidewalks inspections are fully trained on the entire process, including identifying duplicate service requests.
• DPR should establish a reasonable SLA target to complete sidewalk repairs after an inspection is performed and results in the site’s receiving a priority rating above the threshold.

Agency Response

In its response, DPR agreed with five recommendations, did not directly address the recommendation that DPR include a new step when completing inspections, and stated that it will take under consideration the recommendation that DPR establish a reasonable SLA target for completing sidewalk repairs once program eligibility has been determined.