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LIRR crew's antics cost agency $160K and doubled project time for replacement staircase

A LIRR crew assigned to replace a staircase routinely showed up late and left early — a racket that cost the agency over $160,000 and took two times longer to complete than necessary, a new report found.

The stair replacement at the Long Island Rail Road’s Great Neck Station was one of three in-house repair projects in which MTA Inspector General Barry Kluger found workers dragging their feet.

The similar results in all three projects indicate a “systemic” problem within the LIRR’s Structural Maintenance Division, which employs 82 workers, Kluger said.

The staircase that took twice the time to replace and cost the MTA $160,000 because of an LIRR crew's antics.

The IG also found that supervisors failed to set budgets for jobs — a standard procedure for private contractors — and did not create documents to estimate how long jobs would take.

It took workers six months to replace the westbound platform stairs in Great Neck station in 2011 — a job that an outside engineering consultant estimated should have taken just two and a half months.

The workers frequently put in for time and a half pay by claiming they needed to labor through lunch, according to the report.

But when pressed by Kluger, the LIRR supervisors later admitted that it was unlikely the work load required any of the employees to work through mealtime.

GPS technology that tracked the crew — who should have arrived around 8 am every day — found the average time they showed up was 8:45 am.

In two instances, the workers didn’t roll in until the afternoon.

The IG determined the Great Neck job should have cost just over $98,000 in labor costs.

But the LIRR — which will raise fares next year — paid $261,000 in labor costs.

In another maintenance job, Kluger also found that the LIRR lost 120 labor hours because of crew members leaving early and arriving late.

That lost time on the project to install a fence at the Manhasset station represented 13 percent of the total hours worked.

Workers also used manual tools on that job, which could have slowed their production levels down, Kluger found.

And in a third job installing stairs at Deer Park Station, Kluger found that workers weren’t at the site for 13 percent of the time in which they were paid to be there.

In a letter to the IG, the MTA said it intended to improve oversight, including by requiring supervisors to budget for large scale jobs, issue written updates, and establish a protocol for working through lunch.