This does not surprise me.
Unfortunately.
Here are some additional notes/highlights from me:
1) The driving time is of particular note. Parks, as with Transportation has been under constant pressure to shutter yards and remote offices, because 'consolidation saves money' and it frees up land that can be sold or otherwise made use of.....
However, what it also does is put work crews ever further from their work sites. Many parks use to have small remote offices, particular the former Metro Parks (Valleys and Waterfront) which were often attached to the washroom buildings.
This generally allowed staff to have access to spades, weed trimmers, regular (hand) lawn mowers and other basic tools and to address washroom maintenance issues in real time. Today, many of these offices are locked up, as remote crews come from centralized locations to do the same work.
Centralization beyond this, such as the carpentry unit for City Parks (repairs benches, among other things), mean that work that used to be done as soon as problem was noticed, now has to be work ordered to a central site, where it can sit in a pile for ages..........before a crew spends upwards of two hours getting to/from more remote parks to do work.
There was poor or no accounting for the costs of additional non-productive time when making the decision to centralize.
2) In addition to noting the lack of GPS on many Parks vehicles.........the Auditor rightly notes that duty logs for staff are still filled out by hand....(as in pen and paper), rather than being done on a tablet/phone or other electronic device.
3) Just wait til someone tells the auditor about the infinite number of keys required by Parks Staff, because they still don't use maglocks or remote-control opening of bollards/gates for Parks Vehicles, for the most park.