Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott knows something’s rotten with the Department of Public Works, and it’s not the trash smell coming from the garbage trucks.
On Wednesday, five days after a sanitation worker died of heatstroke and a day after labor unions and city councilmen held a news conference to demand changes to DPW’s “toxic culture,” Scott acknowledged something has to change with the beleaguered agency.
A culture of bullying, hazing and intimidation has existed for “far too long” in the department, Scott said, and he promised his administration would punish those proliferating it.
“I want this to be heard and be heard clearly, anybody who’s participating in treating our employees the wrong way, or doing things like that, and we catch you, you will be held accountable,” Scott said at a news conference Wednesday.
Ronald Silver II died from heat stroke while on the job Friday, a day the heat index reached 105 degrees. His death came after the Baltimore Office of Inspector General earlier this summer issued two reports on the working conditions at city-run sanitation facilities, including the Cherry Hill yard where Silver was based.
The reports found broken air conditioning, inoperable water fountains and nonfunctional ice machines at one facility, and damaged locker rooms and locked-up toilet paper at another. Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming personally observed employees leaving for their trash routes without being given water or Gatorade for their shifts, she wrote.
On Tuesday, labor leaders and council members Antonio Glover, Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer and Zeke Cohen, as well as city Comptroller Bill Henry, stood outside City Hall to demand immediate improvements to the working conditions and culture within the department.
“We can no longer treat our men and women like the very same thing they pick up — trash,” said Glover, who once worked for the sanitation department.
Scott, on Wednesday, reiterated that he hears their concerns. The city plans to increase workplace training, look at increasing worker pay and continue with plans to improve DPW facilities. Scott had budgeted $20 million to build new facilities, with construction expected to begin in 2026. The combination of low pay and poor working conditions has enabled DPW’s culture problems to fester, the mayor said.
“Folks feel like they can treat people in a way because they’re not being invested in at all,” he said.
Reached by phone, an official with AFSCME Council 3, the union representing the city’s public service workers, said the laborers welcomed Scott’s comments and actions this week.
The union is ready, along with city council and the mayor’s office, to roll up their sleeves and “make sure our members are safe, staffed up and compensated” across all city agencies, Stuart Katzenberg, AFSCME Council 3′s director of collective bargaining and growth, said.
The disinvestment goes in DPW back decades. Scott said one public works employee he spoke with Tuesday expressed the view that the agency hadn’t seen proper support since before Kurt Schmoke, who became mayor in 1987.
Among the labor and council’s demands to the Scott administration are increased training on health and safety, including first aid and heat exposure. The city cancelled trash collection Tuesday — when the heat index reached 103 degrees — and held safety trainings instead. Training had been offered in the past, Scott said Wednesday, but more could always be useful.
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