S&WB problems run deep, employees say
11th June 2018 · 0 Comments
If any of the observations made recently by a trio of New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board employees are true, it’s going to take a lot more than reliable turbines, fully-functioning water pumps and sheer determination to keep New Orleans safe during hurricane season and beyond.
Among the problems listed by the three employees, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, were a lack of structure in the workplace, poor management, poor communication, nepotism and a lack of accountability.
The employees also told The Louisiana Weekly that the troubled water agency has no workplace manual to aid employees in carrying out various tasks and duties and offers new employees little or nothing in the way of structured, on-the-job training.
“Everybody is just kind of winging it, piecemealing it all together,” an employee who had worked at the agency more than a decade said last week.
The youngest of the three employees, who would only say that he has not been with the agency very long, told The Louisiana Weekly that he noticed immediately how some of the higher-ups and supervisors made it very hard to get information about projects he was assigned to but that he was still pressured to get them done. “It just didn’t make sense,” he recalled. “It was almost like a game to them, like they wanted to see you fail or struggle.”
He said that bothered him until a longtime employee pulled him aside and explained that was part of the culture and the way things were done at the S&WB for as long as anyone could remember.”
The employee that had worked at the agency for more than a decade added that this practice gave older employees job security and a chance to retire and come back as a well-paid consultant.
“They call it information-hoarding around here,” he told The Louisiana Weekly.
“Information is power. They keep that information close to the vest and parlay it into future business opportunities, all paid for by hard-working residents.
“I’ve seen it happen a couple of times since I’ve been here,” he added.
One of the more disturbing pieces of information shared by the employees involved the financial health of the agency and how that is impacting its ability to get the job done.
“Basically, we’re broke,” the third employee said. “Obviously, that’s not something that the S&WB wants the public to know, but it’s true.
“Right now, we are living hand-to-mouth,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “We don’t have enough money to pay our contractors so it’s a major problem in the middle of hurricane season.”
The employees attributed the agency’s financial woes in part to the emergency response to last summer’s flood events, customer billing issues and the previous mayoral administration’s hiring of several unclassified, high-salary executives, administrators and consultants.
While they said they didn’t have a problem with that scenario, all three admitted that their jobs have taken on added stress because they are now being asked to do things that they were never trained on the job to do.
“Asking us to do these things in the middle of hurricane season and not letting the public know the complete story is a problem,” one of the employees concluded.
When The Louisiana Weekly reached out to the Cantrell administration for comment, Richard Rainey, director of communications for the S&WB issued the following statement, “The Sewerage & Water Board remains in a state of emergency that began in March 2017 to repair its power system, and later its drainage and water distribution systems. These emergency repairs were critical, but they did affect the agency’s budget. To address the agency’s future short and long-term needs and goals, the Interim Management Team plans to deploy in the coming days a series of strategies for billing, hiring and financial planning. An immediate top priority is to appoint a new, permanent Chief Financial Officer, a search that we expect to conclude very soon.”
This article originally published in the June 11, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
