AUDIT COMMITTEE SUMMARY
October 16, 2018
Audit of Parks & Recreation Department Playgrounds & Exercise Equipment
Report Issued September 20, 2018
Audit Objective
Determine if park playgrounds and exercise equipment are regularly inspected and maintained.
Background
The Parks and Recreation (Parks) Department operates the City's recreational and cultural programs and maintains more than 240 City-owned parks consisting of 208 playgrounds and 52 exercise equipment stations. The mission of Parks is to provide exceptional parks, facilities, programs and services to improve the quality of life. To help accomplish its mission, Parks performs two types of inspections to address maintenance needs and ensure the overall safety of playgrounds and exercise equipment:
• Low Frequency Inspections are conducted once annually by a Certified Playground Safety Inspector which provide an in-depth look at every playground component.
• High Frequency Inspections are conducted by trained Parks staff on a monthly basis or as approved by the Parks Director. These inspections serve to ensure playground and exercise equipment functionality.
The Park Operations team performs maintenance on playground and exercise equipment through work order requests, which are initiated by calls from citizens or Parks staff. Once work order requests have been identified, they are linked to established service level agreement (SLA) and must be completed within required timelines.
Audit Scope and Methodology
The audit scope consisted of playground and exercise equipment inspections from fiscal year 2017 and subsequent maintenance work orders from fiscal year 2017 through 2018. We reviewed inspections for compliance with inspection standards, appropriate documentation, completeness, and supervisory review. We also verified maintenance needs were completed timely. We also reviewed Parks master listing to verify playgrounds and exercise equipment located at City facilities were accounted for and subject to inspection.
Audit Conclusions
Park playgrounds and exercise equipment are regularly inspected and maintained. Parks performs annual playground safety inspections to ensure all components are compliant with playground inspection standards. In addition, Parks performs monthly inspections of playgrounds and exercise equipment to ensure functionality and identify maintenance needs.
However, we identified areas in need of improvement. Maintenance needs identified during inspections were not completed timely. In addition, support documentation for inspections lacked essential information for the thoroughness of each review. Finally, we identified 5 installations of exercise equipment that were unaccounted for and not subject to inspection.
We made recommendations to address the opportunities. Management agreed with the recommendations and developed positive corrective action plans.