Government of the District of Columbia

DC Department of Public Works

Testimony of
William O. Howland, Jr.
Director

Performance Oversight Hearing on the Department of Public Works Fiscal Years 2011-2012 Budgets

Committee on the Environment, Public Works and Transportation

Councilmember Mary M. Cheh, Chairperson

John A. Wilson Building
Room 500
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Friday, February 17, 2012

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM O. HOWLAND, JR., DIRECTOR
DC DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS
“PERFORMANCE OVERSIGHT HEARING ON THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS FISCAL YEARS 2011-2012 BUDGETS”
BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT, PUBLIC WORKS AND TRANSPORTATION
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2012

INTRODUCTION

Good morning, Chairperson Cheh, members of the Council and staff.  I am William O. Howland, Jr., Director of the Department of Public Works.  I am here today to present testimony about the Department’s FY 2011 and FY 2012 performance.

The mission of the Department of Public Works is to provide environmentally healthy municipal services that are both ecologically sound and cost effective.  To that end, DPW serves all District residents, businesses, visitors and commuters by providing:

• Trash, recycling, litter, household hazardous waste, and e-cycling collection and disposal.
• Street and alley cleaning.
• Solid waste education and enforcement.
• Snow removal.
• Parking enforcement, including towing, booting, removing and impounding abandoned and dangerous vehicles.
• Fleet management, including acquisition and disposal, fueling, and vehicle maintenance services.

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMS TRADITIONAL PROGRAMS

Now, I would like to highlight how technology is transforming DPW programs.

Once again, the District’s fleet management operation is counted among the top 20 Green Fleets in the country because of our groundbreaking FleetShare program, which uses ZipCar vehicle reservations technology to boost our motor pool’s efficiency, coupled with our expanding use of alternative fuel vehicles.

In FY 2012, we equipped two public space operations with tablets and laptop computers to increase their efficiency.

The first operation is our Solid Waste Education and Enforcement Program, or SWEEP.  Inspectors are using these tablets to generate Notices of Infraction in the field, thus eliminating the need to return to the office to look up the property owner’s name and contact information. 

The use of technology is helping to keep productivity constant despite losing half our SWEEP staff due to the September 2011 RIF, and property owners continue to be reminded to better maintain their properties. 

The second operation is our snow program.  Since I testified in December, our snow team zone captains have had a few chances to try out their laptop computers to identify conditions in real time. 

Fortunately, this has been a record mild snow season; nevertheless, we have had events and used these laptops to monitor the activity of the plows. 

Our customers are increasingly using technology, too, and we are taking steps to match their interest. 

For the first time, all of the District’s snow information can be accessed through a single site – www.snow.dc.gov – where snow operations, snow emergency information, safety tips and real-time traffic images are available. 

While we are hoping to dodge any major or minor snow storms for the next several weeks, snow.dc.gov is available to see where our trucks are working, just in case we’re not so lucky!

DPW and MPD exchange information on stolen vehicles.  Currently, at the end of the day, the handheld computers transmit to MPD the data of all the tickets issued.  MPD does a match against the stolen vehicle database.  We are looking into whether this information can be transmitted in real time.  We also are revising the protocol that if there is a match on a stolen vehicle that DPW will automatically void the ticket before the ticket is entered into the system.

In FY 2011, we uploaded TicPix, an online catalogue of images of parking violations that illustrate for motorists why DPW issued them a parking ticket.  A motorist enters the ticket number, license tag and state where the vehicle is registered.  Click “Submit” and images of the illegally parked vehicle appear.

After seeing the images, a number of motorists wanted to pay their tickets immediately, which led us to add a link to the Department of Motor Vehicles’ site for online ticket payments.

I also want to highlight our collaboration with the District Department of Transportation to introduce new parking meter technologies.  DPW has been a constant partner with DDOT during the transformation of the meter program. 

DDOT and DPW have worked collaboratively on all the major projects.  This heightened level of collaboration started during the launch of the parking pilots in 2010 and has continued through the procurement of new meters (single-space and multi-space) and the launch of the pay-by-cell program through Parkmobile.  DC is the largest program with pay-by-cell.

This level of cooperation has resulted in a better experience for customers and also has improved the quality of service.

I would like to conclude this section of my testimony by sharing with you statistics about our monthly Household Hazardous Waste/E-Cycling/Personal Document Shredding program that illustrate how technology and concern for the environment are at work in our customers’ lives.

This program has evolved over the last two decades, starting with an annual household hazardous waste drop-off at Carter Barron Amphitheatre.  We now receive these materials the first Saturday each month at our Ft. Totten Transfer Station. 

In FY 2011, more than 9,800 vehicles brought one or more of these materials to Ft. Totten.  In the first five months of FY 2012, almost 7,000 vehicles have carried these items to Ft. Totten.  If this trend continues, we will eclipse last year’s participation well before September.

Remember, this program began as a service to provide residents with the means to properly dispose of toxic materials.  But now, more residents are using the program to safely recycle electronic devices and prevent becoming an identity theft victim, rather than using it to rid their homes of pesticides, aerosols and batteries.

Residents visiting Ft. Totten either for the monthly household hazardous waste drop-off or the daily drop-off of trash, also may help themselves to compost created from the fall leaf collection program.  In FY 2011, we provided four 40-cubic yard boxes of compost and two 40-cubic yard boxes of mulch created from the tree debris collected after Hurricane Irene.

WHAT’S NEW WITH OUR TRADITIONAL SERVICES

I believe technology applications are important to our overall improvement in services; however, technology cannot do everything. 

Sometimes, we must reengineer how we work to achieve the necessary improvements, and in at least one operation, public space recycling, the improvement exceeded our expectations.

In 2011, DPW, the DowntownDC BID and PepsiCo became partners to boost public space recycling.  The District is the first major city to participate in PepsiCo’s Dream Machine public space recycling network.

The results are:

• An additional 300 public space recycling cans provided by PepsiCo and installed by DPW.
• 54 tons of newspapers, and plastic and glass beverage containers recycled between April 2011 and February 2012.
• The BID awarded DPW and PepsiCo the 2011 Momentum Public Sector Award for our achievements. 
• Our residential mechanical street sweeping program also benefitted from reengineering.

Last year, for the first time, DPW established March 1 through October 31 as the timeframe for our residential street sweeping program.  We listened to our customers’ requests for that level of certainty.  As a result, we redesigned and posted street sweeping signs along the routes to let motorists know when they may and may not park. 

Another innovation in FY11 was the expanded sweeping that occurred in neighborhoods where there were no signs.  Through the use of technology, we introduced greater efficiency in our signed sweeping routes to allow us to complete all these routes in three rather than five days.  With those additional days, we swept streets that aren’t in the signed sweeping program.

In FY 2010, we swept about 28,000 lane miles of residential streets where sweeping signs are posted.  In FY 2011, we swept almost 35,000 lane miles of residential streets, which reflects that expansion. 

In just two weeks, on March 1, we will resume our street sweeping operation, so I want to remind motorists to pay attention to the signs.  Our sweepers will be equipped with Sweepercam, the license plate recognition technology that captures the images of vehicles illegally parked on sweeper routes.

And we continue to tweak the street sweeping program.  This year, we are revising signs in residential neighborhoods with commercial interests to support their customers’ access to curbside parking spaces during the day.  For example, we are posting new times in the 1400 block of P Street, NW where Whole Foods and several restaurants form a commercial island tucked within a residential neighborhood.

Sometimes program improvements are achieved through old-fashioned means.  I’m referring to the acquisition of 45 new 6-wheel dump trucks to replace older vehicles used in the snow program. These trucks will emit fewer pollutants and achieve an 8 percent fuel efficiency boost over the vehicles they are replacing.

We also learned from Snowmageddon that our snow plan must anticipate the unexpected, so we have contracts in place to provide construction equipment – 50 bobcats and backhoes, 5 front-end loaders and 35 additional dump trucks – to meet the challenges a 10-inch or more snowfall may present. This includes hauling snow, as well as clearing curb cuts to give pedestrians and people with disabilities better access to the sidewalks.

Whether our vehicles are performing snow duties, leaf collection or trash collection, they use fuel.  We successfully converted all our diesel-fueled vehicles from ultra-low sulfur diesel to biodiesel, B-10, and we expect to have these vehicles converted to B-20 by April.  B-20 will be used throughout the spring and summer.  The use of B-10 or B-20 means we are fueling our vehicles with either a 10 percent or 20 percent mix of vegetable oil and diesel, which yields a significant decrease in emissions.

Next month, we will begin testing a biodiesel fuel using recycled vegetable oil collected from DC restaurants.  The fuel and oil are pre-blended and the fuel costs about the same price as regular diesel.  Biodiesel is better for our engines and the environment and reduces our reliance on foreign oil products.

While we introduce new efficiencies, streamline work processes and adapt technology to increase productivity, we must keep in mind that our employees are more than units of production.  They are human beings and their sense of well-being influences their productivity. 

In 2010, DPW suffered a tragedy with the murder of a collections employee who had arrived at our W Street headquarters before daybreak ready to go out on his route.  He never got to his truck.  While MPD is continuing its search for the murderer, DPW has made the worksite safer with the installation of security cameras and personnel.  We will add security cameras at other facilities throughout FY 2012.

Another contributor to employees’ well-being is knowing where to report for work.  The District’s economic boom has put pressure on DPW to relinquish facilities where our employees have worked for decades.  For 10 years, we have searched for adequate space and finally were successful with the acquisition of 1431 Okie Street, NE. 

This spring, we will consolidate our Street and Alley Cleaning units that currently operate out of three different sites at Okie Street.  An added benefit of this relocation is that it is near our Fleet campus, which also is where our Parking Enforcement Management Administration is located.

I would like to conclude my testimony by highlighting a week in FY 2011 that is notable because of the major anomalies that occurred and required DPW to respond.  I am referring to the week of August 21. 

During that week, we supported the August 23 DC Residents Day at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, which was monumental in itself but the 5.8 earthquake that afternoon ultimately will be the most remembered event of the day.  Following the earthquake, several DPW structural engineers inspected scores of District buildings to determine if they were safe. 

By the end of the week, we were filling and distributing thousands of sandbags to residents to protect their homes from flooding caused by Hurricane Irene.  Once the hurricane passed, DPW supported DDOT’s effort to remove trees, tree limbs and other debris from streets, sidewalks and alleys.  We cleared more than 267 tons or about 12 tractor-trailer loads of tree debris from District neighborhoods within two days after Hurricane Irene moved out of the city.  DPW also assisted with water and food distribution to residents who were affected by power outages.

Despite being pulled in so many directions that week, trash and recycling were collected on time, parking enforcement continued without interruption and the District’s fleet was fueled and fixed according to schedule.

And that’s why we say, DPW is the Preferred Choice.

That concludes my testimony.  I am happy to answer your questions.  Thank you.