Auditor’s report on support vehicles fuels new criticism of TTC

Two audits at the TTC are raising alarms about the way the transit agency keeps tabs on and gases up the vast fleet of cars, trucks and vans it uses to help run the system.

The TTC spent close to $10-million last year on 455 support or "non-revenue" vehicles and the gas to operate them, but the new audits found few safeguards to track their use.

Instead, the city's Auditor-General found employees filling containers with gas, vehicles rented to fill temporary needs that continued to be used for three, five, even nine years and fuel cards issued for cars that were no longer on the road. Many of these same problems were raised a decade ago by auditors and again in 2010, but with little effect.

"To me that was the most alarming part of this report – a lot of this was not new," said Councillor Josh Colle, TTC chair. "It is indicative of the need for us to be more vigilant. The way that things have been done in the past isn't good enough."

Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong, also a TTC commissioner, calls the findings "remarkable."

"Staff members going with jerry cans to get gas, TTC employees applying for gas cards for cars that have been decommissioned, employees that have left still [having] their cards available to them," he said, listing some audit findings. "It's just a plain squandering of taxpayers' money."

The audits, which include more than 20 recommendations adopted by the TTC audit committee last week, show an urgent need for the transit agency to adopt modern systems for tracking this fleet, the two city councillors say.

CEO Andy Byford agrees, but says it takes time to implement what he describes as a "sea change" at the TTC. "We're turning over previously unturned stones," he said last week after the audits were released. "Have I had to deal with a lot of issues that should have been dealt with years ago? Absolutely."

The report from the city's Auditor-General describes a decentralized system with minimal checks and balances. While it finds no evidence of wrongdoing, in the case of fuel cards, it notes that weak controls mean any misuse is unlikely to be detected. The TTC spent $2-million last year on 441 Petro-Canada cards, which 2,261 employees were authorized to use. But under the current system, the gas purchases are not linked to vehicles and filling of jerry cans also is allowed, meaning there is no way to link gas purchases with vehicle use through odometer readings, the audit found.

Fleet-management practices also raised several red flags. Annual repair bills on aging vehicles are in the range of $13,000 to $15,000 and can quickly exceed the cost of a replacement, the audit noted. Rentals cost $800,000 annually and 25 of the 81 vehicles the TTC leased last year had been used for more than three years. Eleven vehicles had been leased for more than five years and three for more than nine, raising questions about the cost-effectiveness of the practice. Most of the permanent fleet got no preventive maintenance, leading to breakdowns on the road and emergency repairs. Close to 20 per cent of the vehicles were driven less than 10,000 kilometres a year, while about a quarter of the cars and light-duty vehicles were more than a decade old.

Mr. Byford said the TTC is moving to implement changes and has hired a fleet manager. Most of the agency's attention has been on its buses, streetcars and subways and moving passengers, and not enough attention has been paid to how it manages its "non-revenue" fleet, he said.

Mr. Byford called the use of gas cards "sloppy" and "unacceptable" and said he had no idea why the TTC would choose to rent rather than buy a vehicle it used for more than nine years. "I can't explain why we would rent a car for that long. It does seem very inefficient." I'm disappointed to hear that," he said.

Still, Mr. Byford said the TTC is only three years into a five-year plan. "I said to councillors when they appointed me as the CEO that I needed two things – money and time," he explained. "Money is predictable. I would say that, wouldn't I? But I meant what I said when I said time because we are trying to do in five years what many transit agencies would take 10 years to do, in that we are modernizing every single aspect of our operations. It's a big company."