A recently released audit took aim at the operation of Metro’s two solid waste transfer stations. Located in Northwest Portland and Oregon City, the facilities process about 40% of the garbage generated by 1.7 million customers in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties. They also accept hazardous household items like paint thinner, batteries and used propane tanks.
Willamette Week earlier reported on the audit which found “gaps” and “weaknesses” that reveal a “lack of basic management practices” and raise concerns around safety and financial risks for the agency. For example, only 3% of employees at the transfer stations completed annual radiation safety training, and fewer than half completed asbestos awareness training. The audit also found overpayment to a contractor supplying diesel for Metro’s garbage trucks. Joining us is Metro Auditor Brian Evans to talk about the audit and recommendations it made to Metro officials.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a scathing audit of the department that handles solid waste in the Portland metro region. Stories about radioactive waste and a hand grenade are hard to ignore, but the problems lie deeper. The audit of Metro’s two transfer stations found systemic problems and a lack of basic management practices at the department that processes about 40% of the garbage generated by almost 2 million customers in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington Counties. Brian Evans is Metro’s elected auditor. He joins us to talk about what he uncovered after a year of digging. Welcome to the show.
Brian Evans: Thanks, Dave. It’s good to be here.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the calls that came into your accountability hotline in 2020 and 2021?
Evans: Yeah, thanks. These are calls that are coming into an accountability hotline, like you said. This is an anonymous reporting system where members of the public or employees can report concerns. And we received a number of calls over, actually, the last three years kind of raising questions about various aspects of the transfer station operations, which is what generated our desire to look a little bit more systemically at what was going on in the various parts of the operations that were raised in the hotline concerns.
Miller: I imagine that people could call in for a variety of reasons for all kinds of different departments, either the public or anonymous employees. How do you go from calls to a hotline like that, and actually spending a year of your time doing an audit?
Evans: Yeah, it’s a great question and one that I think a lot of auditors who run accountability hotlines are pretty used to working through. And so this is kind of that ‘apply the right level of attention when you receive these concerns.’ So, when we first received concerns, going back to 2020, they were relatively vague but concerning, and so with those we started to dig a little bit and try to uncover what might be generating the concern, how accurate that information is. And then if it’s something that looks like an individual one-off issue, we might hand that off for personnel action to Metro’s human resources department or Office of Metro Attorney. When we see things that look like more systematic or systemic issues, then we consider putting an audit on our schedule to look more comprehensively at the entirety of the policies and procedures that might be governing what’s going on.
Miller: And obviously that’s what happened here. For people who haven’t been to these transfer stations or who’ve just dropped off loads of trash and then didn’t give it too much extra thought, can you just describe these operations?
Evans: Yeah, I’d be happy to give you a little bit of firsthand experience. During the audit I toured both facilities and then I’ve actually gone there ‒ to Metro South in Oregon City ‒ as a customer several times, so I kind of have it from both the auditors brain and also just from the public service brain. But just kind of an orientation is you pull up to a facility. There’s usually someone directing traffic. Usually at Metro Central you’ll go to the scale house. Metro Central is in the Northeast Industrial District of Portland…
Miller: Northeast or Northwest?
Evans: Sorry, Northwest, thank you.
Miller: I thought I’ve been there many times. Okay.
Evans: So that facility is much bigger and it’s relatively easier to navigate. There’s a pretty clear place where you stop at the scale house or you get directed to the household hazardous waste facility. And so those are the kind of two lanes you go to. If you go to the scale house, you’ll tell them what kind of material you’re dropping off. They’ll weigh in to kind of get a sense of how much your car and your load weighs when it comes in. You’ll be directed inside the building to dump materials. And then when you leave, you’ll get weighed again to see what the difference is and you’ll pay based on the material type.
If you go to the household hazardous waste facility, you’ll go in, they’ll offload the material directly for you to avoid you handling it and they’ll take it safely away from your car and you’ll be free to go after that. So the difference between the Metro Central Facility in Northwest Portland versus the Oregon City Facility, Metro South, is that the Metro South facility is much more space constrained. And so there’s heavy trucks moving big materials in and out. The commercial haulers are pulling in at the same place where the residential haulers are. And so there’s a lot more need for traffic management and making sure everybody’s staying in their correct lane.
Miller: Everything you described is stuff that I’ve seen, just as a Metro resident. Driving in, throwing the glass in this place, the wood here, the general trash here. But, what about after? When customers leave, what else do the people who work there do?
Evans: That’s a great question. It’s kind of behind the scenes. So just for folks who may not be aware, at Metro South when you drop off materials, if you’re not at the household hazardous waste facility and you’re a residential customer ‒ or maybe a small load for commercial customers ‒ you’ll be directed into a building that has an open pit where you’ll be asked to back up, dump your load. Somebody will come and kind of look at what’s in there and if they think everything looks okay, they’ll push it into a big pit and then compact it into bigger loads that are loaded into semi trucks.
The same process happens at Metro Central but there’s no open pit there, and so the material is just a flat concrete floor and then various bulldozers and heavy equipment will move that material to the right staging area for transport off site.
Miller: Let’s turn to the results, starting with the physical or environmental safety questions. Can you tell us what happened when workers found a box of old medical supplies that contained radioactive material?
Evans: My understanding is that a customer dropped off these materials at the Metro South household hazardous waste facility.
That facility at that time didn’t have a radioactive sensor at that location, and so the employees pretty quickly recognized that it might be hazardous radioactive material. They took it up to the sensor to verify how significant the levels were. It seemed like they recognized how serious the radiation levels were and started to immediately separate that material. Protocols call for space and distance around radiation as the immediate mitigation. So you want to keep as far away as possible and spend as little time next to what they call hot material. That material was moved to the truck wash station, which is a relatively little-trafficked part of the operation, and the truck wash station was closed down as a result.
The next day, or even later that day, from the information that we received, they called… Oregon state has a resource called the Radiation Protective Services Department. Metro has a contract and a governmental agreement with them. The next day, folks from that operation in the state of Oregon came and inspected the material and suggested that the material probably was not super problematic from a health and safety standpoint, but they also were unwilling to take the material off site. And I think that was something that, from our look at the incident report, kind of gave pause to Metro management.
They were getting some mixed signals about how seriously they should take immediate action versus wait and see. And so they waited to see from the Oregon state response for several months. And then once they didn’t get a definitive answer, started to pursue some of their own solutions because they were still concerned.
Miller: What should have happened? Even as you’re telling this story, and as I read it earlier, I guess I still remain slightly confused about if Metro did something wrong here?
Evans: No, I think you’re right. And I think that’s part of the thing that we’re trying to point out in this audit is that safely handling these materials requires coordination and collaboration across different forms of regulatory environment. So the folks that are on site at Metro South, there were some knowledgeable employees there who took that material and did the safe thing. There was a question, I think from our incident reporting, of how quickly that information should be relayed to other parts of the operation. And so I think that’s always a concern when you see potential legal, financial and health and safety risks, of making sure that there’s enough communication across the agency to get subject matter experts and kind of the right people involved in the decision making.
So I think that’s the part where it was a little unclear for us as auditors, whether the right people were notified at the right time. Once that initial segregating of the material and putting it aside, that looks like it followed the time and distance protocols. The question then remains, what do you do when your partner agency, or when you get a different response from the regulatory agency, whether it’s a federal agency or a state agency? When you have ambiguous information about that, it really puts Metro in a tough position. One solution would be to take the very risk-averse approach and say we have to shut down this facility because we’re unknown. The other is to say, we think we’ve done enough to mitigate the risk and we’re gonna wait and see what we hear from the other regulatory agencies.
Miller: And then it seems that the hand grenade ‒ I can’t even believe this is something that someone just drops off at a transfer station ‒ but the story of the hand grenade intersects, at least in some way, with this radioactive waste. What happened?
Evans: And I think that’s exactly where you’re right, Dave, is where that combination of things that we see as auditors start to get us worried, where maybe individual decision making is completely appropriate, but when you start to have multiple risks piling up on the same facility it becomes even more challenging to know the appropriate way to deal with it.
In this instance, the material that I described previously ‒ the radioactive material that was separated from the public and employees ‒ ended up being the place where, in the emergency evacuation planning for that facility, where employees are supposed to congregate. And so when this grenade came in in March of last year, employees are now congregating, luckily for only a short time, but they’re congregating appropriately following the emergency plan, close to this radioactive material. And so that was something that I think for us, really raised our eyebrows. Even when things go relatively right, in a very difficult situation, you might have some pretty significant risks that need attention. And I think space and distance, especially at South, is really a challenge because of how constrained and busy that facility is.
Miller: You found a shockingly high percentage of employees who didn’t receive required annual training for dealing with various kinds of hazardous substances. 57% had not gotten asbestos awareness training last year. 97% didn’t get radiation safety training in 2022.
But that is different to me than saying Metro workers are not physically dealing with radioactive waste in a safe manner, or they’re not dealing with asbestos in a safe manner. This is about a lack of required annual training. What did you find in terms of... Did you find a connection between that lack of training in 2022 and safety protocols being followed?
Evans: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think that one that’s come up from the Metro council and management as well, and so I appreciate the opportunity to explain that. It’s really for us similar to what I described with the grenade and the hazardous material, is where you start to stack up risks that are probably individually relatively small but collectively could have a big effect.
In this case, we see a really challenging radiation incident coming to the workers on site in December of 2021, and we see about a four- month period where they’re trying to figure out how to deal with it. And we also see that in that same year, 2022, that employees on site are not receiving radiation training. And so another place where, coming out of the pandemic, we have a mix of employees where we have very seasoned employees and then very new employees. And so we’re wanting to make sure that everybody is getting the same training so that if that incident comes up again, that it’s not just relying on one or two people to know what to do, but everybody is trained, because it looks like those risks are more likely to come than not.
Miller: How big an impact did COVID have on everything that we’re talking about? I bring this up because it’s an obvious question. It’s also something that management mentioned at the very beginning of their response, and I’ll read a paragraph in just a bit from them, as we go. But, from Marissa Madrigal, the chief operating officer, as well as the head of the waste prevention and environmental services, they mentioned the challenges of COVID early on. What did you find?
Evans: Yeah, that’s another great opportunity for me, and us in the audit world, to explain where we’re coming from in that situation, where I think we see… You know, I’ve worked at Metro since 2008. And so I’ve seen a lot of variation in the way that management responds to things. And, obviously COVID puts an extreme pressure on folks, like at the transfer station where the facilities are expected to remain open. You have this kind of fragmentation of the workforce where some people are expected to stay home, other people are expected to continue to do their job as normal.
And so it really creates a challenge when you have these risks come up, to make sure the right people know what’s going on and then the right level of mitigating controls or mitigating issues are coming on.
I think we purposely in this audit only looked at training records for 2022, recognizing that that was probably the first time that we could expect some level of normal training to have occurred. We rightly understood that 2020, 2021, is a place where there’s a significant disruption and it’s probably not realistic to expect that everything went right from a training perspective. But by 2022, in combination with the specific radiation incident, makes us think, ‘Hey, we need to make sure that we’re putting the training back into place in the normal space.’ And now is an opportune time to keep that pressure on.
Miller: I want to turn to financial questions, and after we talk about radiation and grenades ‒ and you also outline some injuries that people who work at these stations have suffered ‒ I can imagine financial questions seeming sort of less crucial. But you actually devote a fair amount of time and energy to them. So what do you see as the most significant financial problems?
Evans: I appreciate that question. You know, I think for most people when they think of audit, probably their mind goes to financial risk and kind of a financial lens. And that’s definitely something that we bring as performance auditors to this. And then we’re also trying to couch some of those financial aspects in the broader context of, is Metro providing the services to the public that it said it would?
In this situation, I think it’s specific to the financial risk we found here. It’s a very similar, maybe parallel or pattern that we see, where there’s some good intent on paper and some good structures on paper. And then you have this disruption from COVID, and this long-term relationship with contractors that start to make it difficult to know where it’s time to say, ‘Stop, hey, we need to either adjust the contract,’ or ‘Stop, we need to make sure that we’re getting compliance with this contract.’
For things that are such critical services like garbage and recycling, there’s a lot of money involved and there’s also a need to keep those public services going. So, trying to find that right trade-off of, where’s Metro’s risk tolerance from, ‘Hey, something’s going wrong and we’re going to slowly correct it,’ versus, ‘Hey, we need to have a hard stop,’ and say, ‘Hey, this is a place where we say it’s time to tighten things up.’’
Miller: I want to read part of the response from management, and I should say that overall they ‒ which is not uncommon with these audits ‒ they agreed with the vast majority of your recommendations and then they had some quibbles here and there about how they plan to implement your recommended changes. But they did say this early on:
“Most governments can go a long time without encountering the kinds of risks Metro manages each and every day at our transfer stations. The audit references a few of the more difficult scenarios we encounter, such as receipt of radioactive materials, explosives and other hazardous materials like asbestos. Metro takes the safety of our employees and our statutory responsibility to receive these materials seriously because our entire community is safer when these dangerous materials are quickly identified and disposed of properly. Nonetheless, your report identifies some critical deficiencies in training and contract oversight that my office, WPES, finance and regulatory services, information technology and human resources are committed to addressing with urgency.”
What do you make of the overall response from management?
Evans: Thanks for that question. For us as auditors, it’s always great when we have a responsive management and a management that doesn’t try to find every flaw in our work, or try to find an explanation for every problem that happens, but really recognizes ‒and I think that response speaks to it ‒ the credibility of management in this space to say, ‘Hey, yes, we recognize very similar risks. We’re doing our best. Things don’t always go as we would hope, especially during a global pandemic, and we’re committed to righting the ship.’ So I really appreciate that from management. And then I think I’d go back to the auditor brain and the systems approach that auditors usually take is it’s really hard coming out of a global pandemic to know how quickly to ramp back up to the way things used to be or to adjust to the new normal. And so that could be employees with different experience, or recognizing that different values and risks are being treated differently now in the post- pandemic world.
And so this is really a call to action, I think, from the auditor’s office to say, ‘hey, we think there’s good intent here and we’re trying to make sure we’re keeping the pressure on, to think not only on the short-term risks and the possibility that small decisions could add up to have big effects’. And then also to look past the horizon and say, ‘hey, part of the reason that we’re seeing these challenges is because we have a long-term challenge of how do you cite facilities to deal with very harmful materials, and what’s the long term plan to deal with aging infrastructure?’ Because we’re at an inflection point at both transfer stations. The point of sale system, these are all 30-year-old systems. They need a refresh and a vision so that everybody knows where to put the resources.
Miller: You’re being very positive right now, but you wrote this in the report:
“The weaknesses identified in this report indicate a lack of basic management practices and commitment to a long-term vision for Metro as part of the regional solid waste system.”
When I read that, and we’ve talked to a lot of auditors over the years, that strikes me as about as close as auditors come to saying, ‘This is a complete mess.’ You write in careful ways in general, but that seems like a pretty serious smackdown. I’m just curious, you’ve been doing this for a while as well. You’ve been a Metro auditor for nine years. Can you put this audit in perspective?
Evans: I appreciate getting a chance to talk to that, because auditors are very careful with their word choice and in this case, really chose to lean into some more of the eye-opening examples and tone around management culture. And because I think it’s one of those things where, once you don’t have those mechanisms to get feedback to get it on the right course, it’s very hard to get it back on the right course. So I think that’s really what the intent here is to say, ‘hey, we think there’s still good intent here, and now we need to see those actions and that pace and that attention to detail, to make sure that the intent is matched with some words.’
Miller: Brian Evans, thanks very much.
Evans: Appreciate it.
Miller: Brian Evans is Metro’s auditor.
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