Snowplow operators, facility maintenance technicians who remove trash from highways and all those FMTs who climb out of their trucks to apply hot or cold treatment to potholes, want SHA office staff to know this: We live in different worlds.
Leonardtown RME Philip Burch, who navigates the Northbound Ten team Advance Highway Maintenance 2,0 along with Procurement Deputy Director Kerrie Koopman, makes that point strongly, along with his team’s charge to bridge that divide.
“People from 707 and Hanover, people from offices need to do shadowing, to visit maintenance shops at least for a day,” he says. “See the day-to-day chaos: cops calling, sinkholes. Every morning I walk through my door with a plan and it completely changes. Every single day. Shadowing would bring awareness to what we go through.”
OOM staff comprise about 70% of SHA workers. Improving their processes and the way they obtain support from all the departments is crucial. This NB Ten team is attacking this challenge through four subcommittees: Retention, Contracts, Training and Permitting. These focused groups will provide recommendations after they conclude their work.
Retention is a particular problem, Phil says. The cost of living is high in many Maryland counties, and that makes it hard to recruit workers near shops in those districts. Those who do sign up don’t always stay for long. He observes, for example, that many workers join just to get enough training to qualify for their CDL licenses.
“It costs the State about $12,500 a person to train those FMTs,” he says. “That’s a big investment – and a big loss if, say 10 out of 20 workers leave.”
Then there are contracts, and the role they play in speeding up or slowing down actual repairs.
“We’re looking at several things,” says Kerrie. “One is reducing the length of time, from beginning to end, to sign contracts. Then we’re looking at doing multiple awards, so if the lead contractor defaults, we have another to fall back on.”
Also, says Phil, the contracts subcommittee is finessing the role that bonding plays. In earlier years, he says, maintenance contractors placed a bond to ensure that they’d complete their roadwork as promised. That was dropped to give small contractors a better chance to compete, but an unexpected result has been companies bidding too low and then failing. The subcommittee is looking into ways of fixing that problem.
The number of SHA departments that must sign off on a permit, even to do minor repairs, is another challenge for Maintenance. The subcommittee is examining ways to respond more quickly to customers calls for repairs.
Seemingly minor challenges in training and testing lead to major holdups in the fourth category, training, says Phil. Often there aren’t enough staff to administer qualifying exams after workers are trained. That slows their entrance into the workforce. The subcommittee is addressing this frustration with recommendations about getting more administrative approvers onboard.
More than anything, he says, this Northbound Ten team seeks understanding and cooperation with the broad world of SHA maintenance workers. The chasm became more apparent during the recent pandemic.
“When COVID started,” he remembers, “people began working in the office only a few days a week; that made it hard to reach them when a shop needed a fast turnaround.”
For Maintenance, he says, problems on the roads dictate a completely different approach.
“We don’t have that option,” he says. “We can’t just shut down.”
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