Audit Report on the Performance of the New York City Department of Transportation’s Pothole Repair Program

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The stated mission of the Department of Transportation (DOT) is to provide for the safe and efficient movement of people and goods in the City and to maintain and enhance the City’s transportation infrastructure. DOT’s goals include the rehabilitation and maintenance of the City’s bridges, tunnels, and streets. Street defects fall under various categories, including potholes. The DOT Street and Arterial Highway Maintenance division (SAM) is responsible for repairing street defects.

Small defects (potholes), the focus of this audit, are generally identified in two ways: (1) through calls received from the general public at DOT’s Call-In Center, and (2) by DOT work crews. All identified street defects are entered into DOT’s MOSAICS computer system.This information is tracked and reviewed by SAM on the Field Information Tracking System (FITS), a component of MOSAICS. For Fiscal Year 2002, the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR) reported that DOT repaired 101,280 potholes citywide.

The objective of this audit was to evaluate DOT’s performance in completing pothole repairs within the agency’s goal-related time frame. The audit also assessed the reasonableness of that time frame.

The audit scope covered Fiscal Years 2001 and 2002.

To assess the reliability of pothole repair information shown in FITS, we reviewed 1,788 open pothole repair orders from December 2000, April 2001, and May 2001. To gain an understanding of the procedures for repairing potholes, we interviewed DOT personnel, including the borough office managers and the SAM supervisors and crews. We also accompanied work crew teams from each borough during the period February–March 2002 to observe their daily work routines.

To determine whether DOT had any guidelines regarding timeliness for pothole repairs, we requested all such guidelines from DOT officials. We also reviewed the City’s Administrative Code to determine whether it contained any guidelines related to timeliness for repairs of potholes and other street defects.

We requested a record of the number of potholes that were reported and repaired during Fiscal Year 2001, segregated by month. To determine DOT’s timeliness in repairing potholes, we reviewed a random week’s worth (five workdays) of reported potholes for each of three different months of Fiscal Year 2001.

We conducted our audit in accordance with Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS) and included tests of the records and other auditing procedures considered necessary. This audit was performed in accordance with the New York City Comptroller’s audit responsibilities as set forth in Chapter 5, § 93, of the New York City Charter.

DOT lacks a useful standard for guiding its pothole repair operations and measuring its performance. DOT has an informal standard—to complete 65 percent of repair orders within 30 days—but this is used only for reporting purposes in the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR). Therefore, DOT has no benchmark to guide its operations to help ensure that all potholes are repaired in a timely manner, and to ensure that pothole repair orders do not remain open for lengthy periods of time. In addition, even DOT’s MMR-reporting standard ("to complete 65 percent of repair orders within 30 days") is flawed for several reasons. First, the 30-day component of that standard is arbitrarily set. DOT could give no operational reason for establishing a 30-day criterion, and in that context, a 15-day criterion would make just as much sense, since 15 days is the time standard that determines whether civil lawsuits related to potholes can be brought against the City. Second, the standard fails to account for the remaining 35 percent of the pothole repair orders, and how long they take to complete. As a result, when DOT reports its performance, the agency misrepresents it in terms of the overall timeliness of all repairs.

As far as actual performance is concerned, we took a sample of 1,788 pothole repair orders and concluded that DOT completed 1,774 (99%) of them in 57 days on average. (The remaining 14 were still open as of April 16, 2002.) The number of days that the completed repair orders had been open ranged from one to 2,494 (seven years).

We also found a number of operating weaknesses in the pothole repair program related to DOT’s efficiency in completing orders in a timely manner. Specifically, DOT does not prioritize outstanding repair orders by age, FITS is not updated promptly to record completed work, and already completed orders are sometimes reassigned to new work crews. If these weaknesses were corrected, DOT’s efficiency in completing repairs in a timely manner would improve.

DOT does not prioritize the repair of reported defects based on their age. As a result, some pothole repair orders are allowed to remain open for years. By not prioritizing the repair of reported potholes by age, DOT increases the risk that personal injury or property damage may occur at some potholes because they are allowed to remain unrepaired for long periods of time.

DOT staff members do not update FITS on a timely basis to ensure that all completed repairs are recorded promptly. As a result, when we accompanied work crews (on five occasions), we observed that 34 percent of the repair orders assigned to them had already been completed. Furthermore, 38 (30%) of the 126 potholes that we observed crews repairing (both assigned repairs and "pick-ups"—potholes identified by crews) were not recorded on FITS the next day. In fact, crews did not even record 11 of the 26 pickup repairs on their gang sheets. Thus, all completed repairs are not recorded, thereby understating productivity.

In addition to the fact that FITS is not updated on a timely basis, it appears that the reverse also occurs, i.e., some repairs are counted more than once. According to information recorded in FITS and on work crews’ gang sheets, some repair orders were closed numerous times, possibly overstating productivity. This is of concern because the productivity figures are reported to the public in the MMR, and FITS is the source for the figures. Consequently, we must question the accuracy of the publicly reported figures.

The audit resulted in eight recommendations, some of which are listed below. The Department of Transportation should:

• Establish an operational standard for completing all pothole repairs (not just the 65 percent covered by the current MMR-reporting standard) within a specific period of time and gear operations to meet that goal.
• Prioritize pothole repair orders by age, when feasible.
• Ensure that work crews record all completed pothole repairs, including pick-ups, on their gang sheets.
• Modify FITS so that personnel cannot enter additional data for closed repair orders.
• Ensure that only completed repairs (not temporary repairs) are included in the productivity figures for pothole repairs that it submits to the Mayor’s Office of Operations for inclusion in the Mayor’s Management Report.

The matters covered in this report were discussed with DOT officials during and at the conclusion of this audit. A preliminary draft was sent to DOT officials and was discussed at an exit conference on May 21, 2002. On June 7, 2002, we submitted a draft report to DOT officials with a request for comments. We received written responses from the City’s Law Department (Law) and DOT on June 21, 2002, and June 24, 2002, respectively. To fully address these responses, we revised the draft report and submitted it to DOT officials on October 11, 2002, along with a request for comments. We received a written response from DOT on October 28, 2002. In its response, DOT generally agreed with the audit’s eight recommendations. However, DOT disagreed with the finding related to its lack of a useful time standard to guide its pothole repair operations. The full text of DOT’s comments is included as an addendum to this report.