Audit finds CityWorks reporting gaps at Wayne County 1-800 ROAD call center; corrective actions in process, one recommendation not implemented

The Auditor General's office presented its assessment of the corrective action plan for the Wayne County Department of Public Services (DPS) 1-800 ROAD crew hotline performance audit and identified progress and remaining gaps.

Auditor General Marci Koro said the assessment found management sufficiently addressed four recommendations, four recommendations were in process and one recommendation was not implemented. Auditors flagged shortcomings tied to an automated CityWorks manager emails report that had not been populating because of a system glitch. Erica Jones, a principal senior auditor, said auditors requested CityWorks email reports for a sample of three managers over a three-week period in February 2025 but could not obtain them because the reports had not been distributed.

Auditors identified three related recommendations (22-2a, 22-3a and 22-5a) that call for weekly reviews of the CityWorks employee emails report to identify unacknowledged or long-open role requests; those were deemed “in process” because the automated reports were not available. Auditors also reviewed a call center staff meeting held Feb. 24, 2025, and found meeting sign-in documentation but “no evidence that any of the call center staff had attended the meeting,” leaving recommendation 22-3b in process.

A separate recommendation (22-4b) to ensure call center personnel document when a reported road hazard is outside county jurisdiction was judged not implemented. Auditors reviewed five out-of-jurisdiction service requests from February 2025 and found four with incorrect or missing required fields.

Robin Rivers, assistant division director of Roads Maintenance, said DPS managers and the call center discovered the missing CityWorks reports when auditors requested samples. “Our call center department manager did check with our IT department because it was a computer glitch, and they are trying to identify why it is not populating,” Rivers said. Rivers described internal, manual backup steps the division uses: weekly manager-submitted reports summarizing service requests received, acknowledged, updated and closed; monthly supervisory meetings; and a plan to introduce an electronic (DocuSign) sign-in to improve staff attendance documentation.

Rivers and other DPS officials said the county’s earlier cyber incident had destroyed a server that stored CityWorks data, requiring manual reconstruction of records and spurring a vendor-supported move toward a cloud-hosted update for the system. “We lost our server completely, and they were not able to retrieve it. So we've been manually trying to recover as much as possible,” said a DPS speaker.

DPS staff said they have added a GIS-based mapping capability to help residents see where crews are working and to clarify jurisdictional boundaries; they are also expanding online FAQs to explain service criteria such as tree removals and trimming.

Auditors told the committee they will follow up on in-process recommendations once DPS confirms the system is functioning and will include the not-implemented recommendation in follow-up work. The committee voted to receive and file the corrective action plan. A mover for the motion to receive and file was not specified on the record; Commissioner Garza supported the motion and the motion passed by voice vote.