Anchorage municipality on ‘severe violator’ list for workplace safety rules; state agency warns of $627K in fines

The state agency overseeing workplace health and safety has warned the Municipality of Anchorage that it could see fines of $627,000 — and potentially tens of thousands of dollars in additional fines — if it doesn’t fix numerous serious violations and hire a third-party auditor to evaluate its workplace safety programs within the next four weeks.

In a letter on Friday to Mayor Dave Bronson and the Anchorage Assembly, Alaska’s Labor Standards warned that the city hasn’t met key requirements of an informal settlement agreement it made with the state last year. The settlement had reduced a series of fines it had imposed in 2021 by more than $535,000, to about $92,000.

If the city doesn’t comply with the agreement within 30 days of the letter, the state will rescind the agreement, the letter said. That means it would fine Anchorage the full amount, or $14,502 per day for each citation it hasn’t corrected — or both, according to the letter.

In a rare move, the State of Alaska Occupational Safety and Health Enforcement Section, also known as AKOSH, put the city into its the Severe Violator Enforcement Program last year.

It put the city in the program because of “an extensive inspection and violation history,” and after inspections in September 2021 revealed multiple serious and repeat issues.

The municipality’s workplace safety and health issues stretch back to 2013, occurring throughout the administrations of former mayors Ethan Berkowitz and Dan Sullivan.

However, even after the city was placed on the severe violator program last year, the Bronson administration didn’t follow through with agreed-upon plans to address safety issues, according to Friday’s letter.

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The mayor’s office did not answer specific questions about the safety problems and the letter from the state.

“The Administration takes the safety of Municipal employees seriously. The Municipality has been working with the state workplace safety agency to resolve these issues,” a spokesman said in an emailed statement.

The state’s letter included dozens of pages of citations. Examples include:

• The city failed to provide workers with proper guardrail systems to protect from falls and falling objects, the agency found.

• For workers cleaning city buses who pick up dirty needles, the city failed to minimize exposure to bloodborne pathogens. It didn’t provide proper training, and didn’t provide the right hazard protections or an exposure control plan, among other issues.

• The city also didn’t ensure proper hazard and respiratory protection for workers exposed to lead and other chemicals, nor did it always provide the necessary training and safety information.

Since 2013, state and federal records show that the city has accumulated $982,160 in initial fines for workplace violations. In most cases, the agency reduced or rescinded the fines, bringing the total penalties down to $270,641.

The records also show the city has continued to violate health and safety rules since the state put it on the severe violator list.

In March, April and May of 2022, the agency opened cases resulting in further citations and penalties to the city. A fine in May of $165,919 has since been dropped to $79,761, records show. The city has been penalized $32,748 and $4,478, with no reductions, in the other two cases.

It’s unclear what systemic problems may be at the root of issues in the city’s safety and health programs. The city declined an interview request for this story. A city spokesman did not answer a question asking why the city hasn’t fixed more than two dozen issues — around half of which the state workplace safety agency considers serious violations. He also did not answer a question asking why the city hasn’t yet audited its safety and health programs using an outside expert.

It’s not known how many, if any, workers became ill or were injured as a result of the issues.

The Alaska Occupational Safety and Health Section’s chief of enforcement, William Williamson, said the agency can’t speculate on the inner workings of specific employers. But, he said in an email, “large organizations may lack uniform safety and health programs that are administered consistently throughout different departments, which can create disparities in how these programs are administered within the organization.”

The city has been on the agency’s “high-hazard list” in 2011, 2013, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to Williamson.

That means that during those years, the city was among the top 10% of employers in Alaska with the highest rates of workplace injuries or illnesses among its employees.

The Municipality of Anchorage is the first employer it has put into the severe violator program, Williamson said.

A ‘severe violator’

Employers can be categorized as severe violators when cited for multiple serious and repeated violations, including exposing workers to hazards that could result in serious injury or illness, or other egregious enforcement action, according to the AKOSH field operations manual.

The National Safety Council’s principal consultant, Richard Fairfax, said it’s unusual for a city to end up on that list. The nonprofit organization is headquartered in Illinois.

“I’m not saying it hasn’t been done before, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a public sector employer being put on the Severe Violator Enforcement Program. So that in itself is significant,” Fairfax said. Fairfax previously held top positions in the federal enforcement agency, OSHA, as the deputy assistant secretary and as its director of enforcement.

Severe violators are, essentially, “recalcitrant employers” who are not meeting their obligations under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act, and, as in this case, their state’s OSHA program, he said. (Many states rely on federal OSHA enforcement. Twenty-two states, including Alaska, have their own OSHA-approved workplace health and safety programs that cover both private sector and state and local government workers.)

Those employers continue to expose workers to safety and health risks that can cause injury, illness or death to workers, Fairfax said.

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The program is a tool that the workplace safety agency can use to focus efforts on employers who require more assistance to comply with health and safety standards, Williamson said by email.

“AKOSH has seen many repeat violations across multiple inspections. That indicated to us that the safety program in place was inadequate to protect the health and safety of Municipal employees. As a tool to provide additional oversight, AKOSH placed the Municipality of Anchorage in the Severe Violator Enforcement Program,” Williams said.

The agency has issued more than $834,000 in fines to the city over the last 18-plus months. It has also reduced those fines down to a little more than $209,000 — but that could change if the city doesn’t meet the terms of the settlement agreement quickly.

In last year’s informal settlement, the state agreed to let the city use money it would pay toward the reduced fines to instead hire a safety consultant.

Nearly a year later, the city still hasn’t met that requirement, according to the letter.

“AKOSH took this action based on its determination that the health and safety programs for the Municipality were in such poor condition that an outside evaluation and intervention were necessary to ensure that employee safety and health were protected,” the Friday letter said.

The Anchorage Assembly earlier this month approved a $14,000 contract with a health and safety consulting group at the Bronson administration’s request.

It’s not clear whether the administration intends that contract to fulfill part of the settlement agreement with the state agency. The mayor’s office did not answer questions about the contract.

Assembly Chair Suzanne LaFrance posed a similar question in a Tuesday afternoon email to Acting Municipal Manager Kent Kohlhase.

“This seems like a relatively small action for an issue that was indicated as significant,” LaFrance said.

Lead exposure and needle hazards

Anchorage has failed to remedy 26 different hazards or safety and health regulation compliance issues found during inspections in September and October 2021.

The city has neglected to fix the issues even after the state granted multiple abatement extensions, according to the letter. The state workplace safety agency initially required the city to correct the problems by the end of March 2022. The state then approved monthly extension requests from Anchorage, until sending a final notice to the city in early September that it must abate the citations by Sept. 30.

Many of those unfixed issues are considered serious by the state agency, including that employees who clean city buses overnight, who sometimes dispose of needles, are exposed to bloodborne pathogens:

“Employees are exposed to health hazards including, but not limited to: Death and/or chronic illness from Hepatitis and HIV exposure as a result of the employer’s failure to use standardized engineering and workplace controls to eliminate or minimize employee exposure,” the citation said.

“Employees dispose of needles by picking them up with gloved hands,” the citation said.

Those employees then had to walk off of the buses while carrying needles to dispose of them safely in a sharps container, instead of immediately placing needles into one while on a bus, it said.

That same citation found multiple other issues. For those workers, the city also did not provide proper training and information, didn’t have the necessary exposure control plan and failed to ensure staff had access to Hepatitis B vaccinations within 10 days of their training, among other citation items.

Also, the state workplace safety agency found during two October 2021 inspections at the city’s East Tudor Road facility that the city failed to determine employee exposure levels to lead, and failed to implement necessary precautions or follow regulations.

That facility houses the Maintenance and Operations Division, where employees regularly change HVAC and HEPA filters at the police department’s nearby shooting range. Lead exposure is a known hazard at indoor firing ranges.

The citation included nine different violation items. Among those, the state found the city did not provide effective training, information, labeling and safety data sheets to employees about chemical hazards. It also didn’t establish or implement a written respiratory protection program.

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That exposed employees to hazards including cancer, leukemia, lead poisoning, reproductive system damage, kidney damage, nerve damage and more, according to the citation.

Several of those issues have still not been addressed by the city, according to the state agency. Several were repeated violations.

The state initially penalized the city for a total of $324,770 for that citation. The state reduced the fine to $10,728 in the settlement agreement.

‘A huge liability’

Usually, when a federal or state OSHA enforcement agency agrees to abatement extensions for citations, an interim protection measure is in place, said Fairfax with the National Safety Council.

It’s not clear whether the city has done that. The mayor’s office did not answer emailed questions and declined an interview request.

The state workplace safety agency can’t discuss specifics of open inspection cases, Williamson said, declining to say whether any interim protection measures have been taken.

Leaving known hazards and violations of regulations uncorrected also likely leaves the city liable in the event of an accident, Fairfax said.

“If they’re not correcting the hazards and people are exposed, particularly city workers, and someone falls and they kill themselves, for God’s sakes, or they injure themselves — that’s a huge liability for the city,” he said. “They should be correcting it because it’s the right thing to do, but sometimes it takes the threat of, if someone gets hurt, the liability and the cost associated with that.”

The state sent a letter addressed to former Municipal Manager Amy Demboski about the situation a year ago. That letter, signed by former Labor Standards and Safety Division Director William Harlan, notified the city that the state had classified the municipality as a severe violator.

Repeat citations, the city’s inspection history and the latest violations, from September and October 2021, necessitated the classification, Harlan said.

“From December 22, 2015, to present, the Occupational Safety and Health (AKOSH) Enforcement section has inspected the Municipality of Anchorage 21 times for health or safety related issues. Fourteen of these inspections resulted in the issuance of 86 citations, nine of which were repeat violations. In addition to the enforcement activities, during the same period the Municipality of Anchorage has worked with the AKOSH Consultation and Training program on numerous occasions regarding the Municipality’s safety program,” Harlan said in the letter.

Last fall, Demboski had a meeting with Assembly leaders to brief them on workplace safety compliance problems. Demboski raised the issue as significant and critical, LaFrance said in her email to Kohlhase. She requested that he update Assembly leadership on OSHA compliance.

Assembly leaders have scheduled a Thursday work session on the issue.