Calgary streetlight repairs were taking up to 450 per cent longer than contracted key performance indicators, according to a newly released audit report.

The lengthy delay for repairs is something one Calgary city councillor said he’s heard about nearly every day since being elected to office.  

The report comes to the City of Calgary’s May 23 Audit Committee meeting and calls for a dedicated contract compliance monitoring process to manage the service delivery of the city’s more than 105,000 streetlight luminaires.  The replacement value is more than $1.9 billion.

“The current service delivery prioritization and escalation processes do not support timely repairs of the most urgent outages and require review,” read the report from the city auditor’s office. The audit said that this impacts mobility, safety and crime prevention in Calgary.

During the audit period, response times for corrective maintenance were more than 400 per cent higher than contractual KPIs, the report noted. They also said that the work management system used doesn’t contain enough data to support effective repair operations or contract management.

The City of Calgary said last September that they were taking steps to address a backlog that they said was created due to hiring a new contractor for this service. The City awarded that contract back in November 2022. Enmax had attended the service calls before that.

The audit period was from July 2022 to June 2023.

Ward 7 Coun. Terry Wong said it’s not just inner-city communities where the infrastructure is much older and repairs are required. It’s happening all over Calgary.

“A new contract has been in place for about a year now and we’re still suffering with the delays,” he said.

The audit also showed that details in relevant streetlight-related work orders were inconsistent, with less than two per cent having “complication” note entries, jumping to 4.42 per cent for escalated work.  Overall only 269 of 1314 work requests had crew notes, which the audit report said complicates “effective cost analysis and resource management.”

Challenges and recommendations

Coun. Wong said most service requests fall into two categories: bulb repair, or underground wiring or the switch box.  The latter requires significantly more time to repair due to the potential need to tear up the ground to get at the utilities, he said.

Making that clear to Calgarians will help them understand why some issues are taking longer than others, Wong said.

“I’ve asked (admin) to change their reporting system whereby if it’s a lamp out, it’ll show it that way, and turn it off once repaired,” Coun. Wong said.

“If it’s an actual switch, transformer or something of this directive change the layout so people know it’s been reported and this is going to take longer than necessarily do that, so the public isn’t just saying that our service response time was slow.”

The audit report makes a series of recommendations, including a review of the prioritization of repairs and the escalation response process.

It also said that the current contract monitoring process doesn’t align with the contract requirements. The report showed that the contractor complied with safety, insurance, hazard assessment other areas, but failed in scheduling, mitigation, and notice-to-proceed requirements.

They also want to address the data collection, noting that 311 service requests aren’t included in the contractor’s work management tools, impacting clarity on service times. Information also wasn’t collected on repair times, nature of work or urgency of repairs.

“Inaccurate/incomplete information limits the ability to analyze costs, repair time rates, or prioritize maintenance activities, and can limit analytic capabilities that support informed decision making,” the audit report reads.

Management agreed to the recommendations in the report with plans in place to accomplish the work by December 2025.

Progress is being made

The audit committee heard from Mobility director Troy McLeod that they’ve whittled a backlog of 5,000 streetlight repair requests down to around 500 over the past several months. McLeod noted that the transition in contractors resulted in a massive backlog.

“We’ve now reduced that to less than 500 and city-wide we’re at just over 99 per cent online as far as streetlights, so a significant increase in our response,” he said.

While they are working with a primary contractor, city admin also said they have begun working with smaller contractors to backfill and to provide redundancy in delivering the appropriate service to Calgarians.

Ward 8 Coun. Courtney Walcott said the challenge with audit reports is that they capture a point in time and don’t always reflect some of the challenges faced by business units outside the scope. When he first read the report he was struck by the delays, but then recalled some of the barriers to service the City of Calgary faced in dealing with streetlight service requests.

“We are the first port in the storm, and my office received a lot of those questions and I’ve gotten a lot of answers over the last couple of years about what some of those challenges are,” Walcott said.

Admin confirmed there were several complex outages during that time, some that required underground wiring work and others that involved complete pole replacement.

They added that they see between 700 and 800 streetlight service requests per month. They said the intention is when they are under 500 work requests they will be able to meet the 10 to 14 day response time.

Citizens can report streetlight outages online.