Tampabay: Safe driving record not required

ST. PETERSBURG -- Carl Lester Byrd had a DUI accident in 1984: His car struck and killed a pedestrian. He tested positive at work this year for marijuana, and he has eight recent tickets and three at-fault accidents.

Demond Shingles has a felony record and 17 traffic citations in the past 10 years. Nathaniel Swain has two DUIs, and his boss says, "When you see the guy, you would not think he has a drinking problem."

These are all men St. Petersburg employs full time to drive trash trucks that weigh 16 tons -- empty.

Many of the drivers' violations happened in their personal cars, simple machines to operate. But the trash trucks take particular skill to drive. They have hydraulic arms designed to lift and empty trash containers. One small mistake and the arm can damage houses or cars or severely injure people. And mistakes happen.

The trucks have up to eight mirrors drivers must constantly monitor. They are extremely difficult to back, and drivers must back frequently on their routes.

Twice a week, these machines thread their way through the alleys and streets next to every home and business in the city. Because of the difficulty and the trucks' broad exposure to city residents, the job appears to call for excellent driving.

But the Sanitation Department has a strong employee union, and St. Petersburg has a tradition-steeped routine of hiring and managing drivers that that may startle outsiders:

The city does not seek experienced truckers or the safest drivers to fill these jobs that pay from $30,000 to $50,000 per year, counting overtime. An experienced long-haul trucker, for instance, would not be hired directly as a trash truck driver.

The city requires all new hires (most with no commercial driving experience) to start as manual laborers, then promotes the most senior to lucrative driving positions if they obtain a commercial driver's license and score well on a written test.

Though driving is the central task for sanitation specialists, many drivers receive excellent evaluations even in years when they have on-the-job wrecks or driving infractions. Off-the-job crashes or tickets are not counted against employees unless they cause their driver's license to be suspended. It takes three at-fault wrecks at work within 18 months to get a driver fired or demoted.

The department takes a fatherly approach to drivers -- for instance, reassigning to non-driving jobs those whose driving licenses are suspended.

"I am kind of protective of my employees, even when they screw up," city Sanitation Director Chuck Schauer said. "I think it has a great impact and they know you care."

Most of St. Petersburg's 66 senior trash truck drivers have a good safety record. Half have received one citation or none in the past 10 years, despite driving for a living. There have been no recent deadly accidents involving trash trucks.

Schauer says that shows the system works.

But there have been truck accidents that damaged people's cars, homes or businesses. That damage has cost the city $483,146 over the last four years. The cost has been trending lower over that time.

Six of the 66 drivers, or 10 percent, have DUI records. Another two were involved in crashes offduty where drinking was cited as a possible cause, but they were not charged with drunken driving. About 23 percent of the drivers, 15, have at least three accidents on and off the job in the past 10 years. Eleven drivers have gotten four or more total traffic citations.

Once an employee becomes a driver, the city takes a relaxed approach toward driving incidents on and off the job.

Nathaniel Jerry Swain, 56, got his first job at the Sanitation Department in 1973.

The thick files documenting his city employment are littered with incidents for which he was written up, including violation of procedures, absenteeism and other problems with his work. Even though he has two DUIs on his offduty driving record and twice lost his driver's license, the city has helped him get back behind the wheel of a garbage truck both times.

In 1988, Swain was charged with drunken driving. His license was suspended, so then-Sanitation Director David H.M. Holihan exhorted Swain that "you must have a license that is valid," and gave him 45 days to obtain one. Swain received a permit to drive for business nine days later.

In 1996, Swain was again charged with DUI, and the report showed his blood alcohol level at 0.301 percent, more than three times the level at which the state then presumed a driver impaired. This time his license was revoked for a year.

"Because of the amount of time he worked for the city, we found him other employment," Schauer said, adding that Swain worked in traffic engineering. Swain took a demotion to Maintenance Worker II.

Eventually, Swain got his license back. In May 1999, Schauer rehired Swain to drive a garbage truck, making $14.81 per hour. Despite repeated attempts, Swain could not be reached for comment.

Is a man whose drinking has so affected his driving really a good choice to drive a 16-ton truck through narrow alleys for a living?

"Swain is an excellent operator," Schauer said. "He's got a lousy record outside on his own. When Swain comes to work, he is fit for duty. When you see the guy, you would not think he has a drinking problem."

Carl Byrd, now 58, started with the city in 1970. At work he was written up seven times for such things as absenteeism, insubordination and tardiness in his first decade.

Off duty, he hit a pedestrian with his vehicle on 27th Street S on April 4, 1984. The woman died. She had been drinking, too, so Byrd was convicted of DUI and had his license revoked for 180 days. Though Schauer said he is aware of the incident, it didn't get Byrd fired.

In the mid 1990s, Byrd received his 25-year service award, which said, "it is because of the loyalty of employees such as Carl that the department has had these opportunities to become a leader in the solid waste industry."

Last March, Byrd tested positive for marijuana in an at-work drug test. He was suspended from driving for 45 days without pay, and Schauer urged him in a memo, "Carl, I urge you to seek help in overcoming your substance abuse problem."

He has continued to drive his residential route in the Old Northeast since then. Byrd said his driving record outside work is irrelevant.

"If I had had (on-the-job) accidents, that would be one thing," he said. "You should check through everybody's record who had (on-the-job) accidents. Why don't you dig at those other folks. Yeah, they found marijuana in the system, but you're not supposed to publicize that."

The city hired Demond Shingles despite a felony criminal record and a lengthy record of driving infractions. In 1994 he pleaded guilty to possession of crack cocaine and grand theft and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

He has 17 citations in the past decade (which included months in which he was not driving because he was incarcerated). Many of them were tag and vehicle equipment violations. Three times he was charged with driving with a suspended license in 1993. He got three speeding tickets, two within five days in 1997.

"On my traffic, my traffic tickets are from the past before I got hired in the city -- that was back in my juvenile days," Shingles, 28, said before telling a reporter, "I don't want my driving history in the paper," and hanging up.

The Sanitation Department hired him in June 1997. Shingles swiftly made sanitation specialist and became a pool driver, covering other drivers' routes when they are absent.

Though Shingles asserted his driving is "impeccable," the city this summer had to defend a small-claims lawsuit after Shingles' trash truck and a Cadillac collided on his route.

The judge found each driver partially at fault, but the private driver's attorney brought up Swain's driving record. Fortunately for the city, there was no injury and the stakes were small. The city had to reimburse the driver $300 with interest to cover 40 percent of the value of his 1970 Cadillac Fleetwood.

But if a garbage truck driver with a record like that of Swain, Byrd or Shingles were involved in a serious on-duty accident, how would their driving history and the city's knowledge of it play before a jury if someone sued the city seeking millions of dollars?

"Where it would go, I don't know," said City Attorney John Wolfe. "You'd have to look at (the Sanitation Department's) overall safety record, and I think it's a fairly decent safety record. What one aspect of their management technique is, you really shouldn't isolate that."

Promoting from within helps the city fill the entry-level manual labor positions by offering those people a chance for significant advancement.

"If you check the morale in the Sanitation Department, it has high morale," Wolfe said.

"We hire them into jobs that are not desirable," Schauer said. "We also are supposed to hire out of the Challenge Area (an area of low-income neighborhoods). We hire the best people we can find; we get a pretty good bunch of people."

Still, Schauer said, "That's a concern," when asked if he was worried about increasing the city's liability by keeping drivers with a poor history. "We were sending them all to defensive driving courses. I don't know if that's happening anymore. That's important."

Schauer said a reporter's questions had prompted him to tell his supervisors to remember to take driving records and at-work accidents into account when completing annual reviews.

And he said questions about some individual drivers made him want to keep closer tabs on them.

"I'm going to have (deputy sanitation director) Ben (Shirley) get with the managers, get with some of these guys," Schauer said.

"Except for a couple of people, our drivers are pretty good."

-- Times researchers Cathy Wos, Caryn Baird, John Martin, Kitty Bennett and Barbara Oliver contributed to this report.

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