Complaints about everything from job safety to the security of the water system have been lodged against the Madison Water Utility by its employees for years but have prompted little action from utility or city administrators, the workers say.

The complaints, which stretch back as far as 10 years, have even sometimes been met with discipline from water utility management.

It's only in the last two weeks that the city has responded in a major way to the concerns. Last week, Mayor David Cieslewicz said he will ask the City Council to approve hiring a consultant to study management problems within the utility. The analysis would cost $50,000.

Also last week, Cieslewicz announced he will recommend renewal of the contract for David Denig-Chakroff, the utility's general manager.

Because of recent disclosures about problems within the utility, the proposed contract - which will require approval by the City Council - includes several performance standards. One of those standards calls for improvements in relations between management and workers and a "more participatory management processes."

Despite these recent developments, however, employees wonder why it has taken so long for their worries to be adequately addressed. They remain skeptical, especially because the consultant the city intends to hire to do the management study was recommended to the mayor initially by Denig-Chakroff.

Confidence among employees was further eroded by a water utility staff meeting Friday morning at which employees were warned to be careful about what they put in e-mail messages because of media open- record requests. They were also reminded that their work cell phones are not for personal use.

"The message," said Joe Stein, a utility employee and union steward for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 60, which represents the utility workers, "was not to put anything in an e-mail that you don't want to see on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal. The timing was horrible. People took it as a warning."

Denig-Chakroff said Friday that the reminder about e-mails was to alert employees that the content of their e- mails is open to public scrutiny.

"Well, that was a warning," he said. "Some e-mails were uncovered that had very inappropriate things in them."

Litany of trouble The State Journal, through record requests and interviews with union officials and employees, found the following:

Employee complaints about management and security have been ignored or met with retaliation. A worker who demonstrated security flaws by prying open a door was suspended and ordered to provide documentation from a physician that he wasn't a danger to himself or other employees.

The city has been investigating charges of job discrimination against utility managers for more than a year. The mayor's office announced Friday that the investigation has been completed and the inquiry found no evidence to support the charges.

Union officials say they are particularly concerned about management's lack of response to safety concerns. A safety committee went more than a year without meeting.

A letter from a utility employee to the mayor's office seeking help in resolving problems was returned to Denig- Chakroff, one of the managers about whom the employee was complaining.

A recent Wisconsin State Journal investigation of the Madison Water Utility and oversight of the city's drinking water turned up numerous problems with management, including a lack of response to public complaints about water quality, sloppy record keeping and an unwillingness to communicate potential problems with the water supply to the public.

"There is 100 percent dissatisfaction with the way this place is run," Stein said.

Fear of retaliation

One fear cited by numerous employees is that they will face retaliation from management if they speak up about problems such as water quality or security. Jim McCormack, also a union steward, said such fears prompt him to be careful about filing grievances.

"You file a grievance and your chances of getting promoted are pretty slim," said McCormack. "So I file grievances for a group and put my name on it."

According to documents from AFSCME Local 60, a worker was disciplined in 1996, shortly after Denig-Chakroff took over as general manager, for demonstrating how easy it was to break into a water utility building.

The employee, according to the records, had warned utility management about a lack of security. Other workers had expressed similar concerns.

But when he received no response to his warnings, the employee in question used a screwdriver to show another employee how easy it was to pry open a door.

As a result, the employee was placed on administrative leave and told he could not return until he presented a statement from a physician saying he was not a danger to himself or other employees. Eventually, he was suspended without pay for three days.

After filing a grievance through the union, the employee in 1997 reached a settlement with the utility which called for the disciplinary action to be expunged from his records.

Denig-Chakroff said the utility acted appropriately in the matter. He agreed the security issue pointed out by the employee was legitimate - the insecure structure has since been replaced - but said the worker went about exposing the problem in the wrong way.

"That was no excuse for an unauthorized break-in," Denig- Chakroff said. "If an employee tries to break into one of our unit wells without authorization or damages city property, that is absolutely going to require some response."

It's not the only time security has been raised as an issue. The State Journal investigation revealed one instance in which the utility failed to report a break-in at a water tower to police or the Department of Natural Resources, which regulates the agency.

Worker safety

More recently, according to Stein, the utility has been slow to respond to safety complaints from workers.

Worker safety was an issue raised by consultants in a report released last year on the utility's aging infrastructure. The report said the utility is in violation of codes for not having separate mixing rooms for chemicals at many of its older wells.

Stein said the utility's safety committee went 14 months without meeting. He said there are very few if any safety posters in the utility's new building. And he said individuals in upper management rarely visit job sites to check on safety issues.

McCormack said he is dismayed with the management's slow response to a recent union grievance in which concerns were raised about the frequency with which workers on flushing crews are required to turn valves.

Opening and closing valves takes a lot of muscle, frequently requiring two workers, and has been shown in the past to cause shoulder and other injuries.

McCormack said the grievance was filed in March and has still not been resolved, even though crews have been turning valves as part of the expanded flushing program since early spring.

Denig-Chakroff said the response to the grievance has been slowed because the utility has had difficulty finding a physical therapist to discuss the concerns. He disagreed that utility managers do not place enough emphasis on safety.

"I totally disagree that it's under-emphasized," he said. "Safety is an extremely important part of my job, and I take it very seriously."

He agreed the safety committee has not met regularly but said he is seeing to it now that those meetings are more frequent. He also said a consultant was brought in last year to review safety procedures.

Letter to mayor

In another recent instance, an employee became so upset with lack of response to problems from management that he wrote a letter to Cieslewicz, which the State Journal obtained in an open records request.

"We seem to be a department spread with discontent and lack of direction," wrote Jerry Schoenemann, an inspector with the utility. "The utility is like a ship at sea and nobody at the helm. . . . I'm talking about a managerial problem. It's costing the city money and affecting work productivity."

Cieslewicz did not speak with the employee but instead returned the letter to Denig- Chakroff and asked him to look into the matter.

He said the complaints in the letter were vague and did not refer to specific managers. He also said he was following the protocol for responding to complaints from city employees.

"Unless an employee's complaint or concern is about the agency's top manager, I generally would like the manager to be given the opportunity to resolve the complaint before my office intervenes significantly," Cieslewicz wrote back.

Schoenemann said he was afraid to use specific names in the letter.

"That would just be setting yourself up," Schoenemann said. "You send a letter to the mayor and you'd hope at least to get interviewed by him. If there had been a meeting, I would have been more specific."

Eventually, Schoenemann said, he did have a discussion with Denig-Chakroff but recalled that little else came of the letter.

McCormack said he was dismayed that the mayor sent the letter back to one of the very managers about whom Schoenemann was complaining.

Morale problems

The discontent has resulted in at least one formal investigation that had been under way since November 2005.

Top managers at the water utility were investigated by the city for gender discrimination. But, according to Janet Piraino, the mayor's chief of staff, the investigation was just completed and utility managers cleared. The three women who sought the investigation were notified of the outcome Friday afternoon.

"The finding," Piraino said, "was that there was not enough evidence to support the charges."

But Cieslewicz said he agrees there seem to be morale issues within the utility.

"I think you get situations like this in every department where employees are unhappy," Cieslewicz said. "In the water utility it does seem to go back a ways and is persistent."

Denig-Chakroff also acknowledged morale problems.

"I don't have any particular sense that it is any worse in the water utility than in any other city department," Denig- Chakroff said. "But I think there are certainly some issues that need to be addressed. There are issues people are unhappy about. If you get right down to it, it's communication, people feeling they are not listened to."