Delays in Repairs of County Vehicles May Cost Contractor

Los Angeles County authorities say they will levy fines on the holder of a $50-million vehicle repair and maintenance contract, the biggest ever awarded by the county in its program of turning government work over to private enterprise.

Only five months into the five-year contract, officials say county services have been disrupted by long delays in repairing and maintaining the county’s huge fleet of cars, trucks and prisoner buses. The contractor, Holmes and Narver Services Inc. of Orange, failed to meet key conditions of the agreement, according to officials and internal memoranda obtained by The Times.

The memos report that large numbers of vehicles are tied up in the shops, awaiting repairs. They say delays in repairing Sheriff’s Department buses have slowed delivery of prisoners for court appearances, causing delays in the already jammed criminal justice system.

The backlog prompted a top official to warn the repair firm that “few of the contract standards are being met.”

The criticism is important because it is the first time a major contract has come under official fire since the contracting system was instituted by the Board of Supervisors. The voters authorized turning work over to private contractors in 1978. Two years later, the program was adopted as the county’s policy when a conservative majority took over the board and hailed privatization as a way of saving money and improving efficiency.

March 1 Deadline

Holmes and Narver Services has been given until March 1 to improve its performance, an action taken by county officials Dec. 14. As the deadline approaches, county officials said they are calculating the amount of damages to be assessed but do not yet have an estimate.

Holmes and Narver Services Vice President Lee McIntire characterized the delays as “typical start-up problems. We don’t find this one to be unusual.”

He and company President Newman A. Howard said they still are optimistic that they will meet the deadline.

As recorded in memos on file in the county Facilities Management Department, the contractor has been ordered to:

- Fix a big backlog in repairing Sheriff’s Department buses.

- Provide a usable computer system for tracking vehicle repairs and how the vehicles are being used when in service.

- Clear out a major jam in general automotive and other repairs that kept vehicles sidelined for months, and often sent back to the shop for repeat repairs of the same mechanical failures.

“We’re already calculating what our damages would be” for failure to provide the necessary computer services, said William F. Stewart, deputy chief administrative officer.

If the other problems are not solved by then, Stewart said, additional financial penalties may be imposed.

“I intend to hold them responsible,” Stewart said.

The contract covers more than 6,500 vehicles and assorted motorized equipment ranging from weed cutters and lawn mowers to Sheriff’s Department patrol boats, squad cars, regular county autos, trucks, tractors and cement mixers.

Cars assigned to the five supervisors, Chief Administrative Officer Richard Dixon and other high-level officials are also maintained by Holmes and Narver Services as well as the pool cars available to county workers for specific assignments.

The contract also covers other seemingly unrelated services such as chauffeuring the five Regional Planning Department commissioners and others to meetings or on van tours.

The problems started early on with criticism that Holmes and Narver Services allowed its workers to repair their private cars at county expense and that county vehicles came back from servicing dirty or smudged with grease. One agency complained that one of its commissioners was late for a meeting because the chauffeur did not show up on time. Most of those failures have been corrected.

On Oct. 25, three weeks after Holmes and Narver Services took over, Stewart wrote to the supervisors that “the transition occurred in an orderly and satisfactory manner.”

‘Being Corrected’

“As was expected,” he wrote, “there have been some transition problems which have been or are being corrected.” He noted that the company was making headway in reducing a backlog in vehicle repairs it had inherited.

However, three days later, the Facilities Management Department’s contract manager, Bruce Mullin, told Holmes and Narver Services that his own review of the backlog showed “your figures are not factual and do not reflect an accurate representation of our vehicle out-of-service rate.”

Things quickly went down hill.

“I am rapidly losing confidence in (the contractor’s) ability to gain control of the operational problems . . .” Stewart wrote to Holmes and Narver Services in the Dec. 14 letter that was hand-delivered to the firm’s headquarters in Orange. “Indeed, few of the contract standards are being met.”

The backlog was worse than when county workers performed the maintenance and complaints were rolling in from all directions.

A review of county records show repeated complaints from the Sheriff’s Department. Prisoners were late getting to court appearances because too many buses were down for repairs. Of the aging fleet of 61 buses assigned to the department, ideally no more than 10 should be out for repairs on any day, Capt. Jerry West said.

“Before the contract, that (goal) was maintained for years,” West said. “When we went into the contract, that shot up quite a bit. I got quite concerned because what we do here is mandated by law, and we have to have the equipment to do it.”

The Sheriff’s Department is responsible for transporting about 2,000 prisoners each day to court appearances throughout the county.

Newer Buses Suggested

Holmes and Narver Services responded in part by suggesting that the county buy newer, easier to maintain buses.

But West said the fleet was not “that much older in October (when the firm took over) than it was in September (when county workers performed the task.) They contracted to service what we had, not what we wished we had.”

Workers in the Animal Care and Control Department took matters into their own hands when they tired of mechanics telling them a repair would take longer than expected because “we have to order the part.”

In a memo to Mullin, Animal Control vehicle coordinator Bruce Richards said, “One of my supervisors anticipated this statement, so he went to the local auto store, purchased the part and installed it himself.”

The county’s weed abatement division complained that three vehicles had been in for repair for more than a month; the Fire Department fumed over the five hours an employee was forced to wait to get two truck tires changed; the Parks and Recreation Department was without 12% of its fleet at one time, and Olive View Medical Center said mechanics lost a backhoe.

To combat the problem, Holmes and Narver Services has added more mechanics, sent some work to outside vendors, increased parts deliveries, beefed up quality controls and replaced the project manager.

Incentives Offered

And they launched Operation Spring Cleaning to put a major dent in the backlog. Mechanics were offered time-and-a-half pay for working the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend that also spanned Super Bowl Sunday. Cash incentives were offered individual high achievers. A $1,000 award was promised to the team that cleaned up its backlog and made the greatest inroads into remaining repairs.

Parts department workers were promised $500 if the overall vehicle backlog was less than 300 on Jan. 23. (The $500 apparently went unclaimed. The backlog that day was 357.)

Recently, West and Mullin said, the bus service has improved considerably, and this week, for the first time, the company had fewer than 10 buses in for repair.

Mullin said the company is continuing to move toward the 5% goal for overall repairs although “not real rapidly.” Generally, the percentage of vehicles in the shop for repairs has been no better--and often worse--than when county workers did the work.