Last year, public employees in San Diego County built fences with public money at prices that made them say, “Yikes!”

They grappled with “screw ups” — including repaving a street scheduled to be dug up for utility work the following week.

They predicted something would “hit the fan” when parents learned their middle school students were spending their days in mold-infested classrooms.

The San Diego Union-Tribune found these problems and others by sifting through tens of thousands of emails requested under the California Public Records Act from 107 government agencies throughout the county.

The governments were asked to search official employee email accounts for 19 phrases that might indicate trouble was afoot, such as “uncomfortable,” “perception problem” and “OMG.”

The request was a test of government transparency, to mark Sunshine Week, an annual March effort among news organizations to raise awareness of open government laws.

As originally submitted, the request turned out to be quite broad. The word “shoot,” for instance, shows up in many contexts other than an expression of frustration — such as, “shoot me an email.” But most of the governments worked with U-T Watchdog to narrow the request, by search term or number of emails accounts, to release some records in a show of transparency.

Where the Del Cerro paving job came to a halt. Courtesy Scott Sherman

Stop the steamrollers

Del Cerro Avenue and Airoso Avenue in Del Cerro were being repaved this past June, normally a welcome sight in any San Diego neighborhood.

Then someone in Councilman Scott Sherman’s office realized San Diego Gas & Electric would be coming through to tear up the same street a week later. The observant staffer noticed the conflict during routine monitoring of public works projects, having remembered the SDG&E project from discussion in a recent meeting.

Sherman’s office was able to halt the repaving project about half-way through, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and further construction-related traffic headaches.

The city has a project-tracking database that’s supposed to avoid such inefficiencies, but the SDG&E project was still in “pending” status and wasn’t showing up. The database has since been changed so that pending projects also appear, allowing the city to catch more possible conflicts with road project scheduling.

“This was a case that exposed a systemic problem,” said Sherman’s chief of staff, Barrett Tetlow. “This sort of stuff happens all the time, but it’s gotten better over the years. It (the repaving) shouldn’t have happened, but now we have a permanent change on the whole (system).”

In November, a building industry policy expert sent an email to Councilman Mark Kersey’s office, using the road project as a cautionary tale. Michael McSweeney, senior public policy adviser at the Building Industry Association, was warning about the foolishness of installing solar panels on roofs that will wear out long before the solar panels do.

“The city has many silos and they rarely communicate with one another,” McSweeney wrote. “It’s up to council staff and their ‘eyes and ears’ in the community to keep these screw ups from happening.”

Not just ‘yikes’

Two fence bids caused a “yikes” email, one at the Padre Dam Municipal Water District in Santee and one at the Olivenhain Water District in Encinitas.

A December email involving six Padre Dam employees outlined three bids for a 700-foot-long, 6-foot-tall galvanized chain link fence topped with three strands of barbed wire. The cost projections were met with not only a “Yikes,” but a “Double Yikes,” too.

Padre Dam chose the lowest bidder and paid $20,910, a district spokeswoman later told the Union-Tribune. The high bidder was $26,850.

The high bid was a little more than twice the nationwide average cost to install a fence with similar specifications, based on data from ProMatcher, a price comparison website.

Spokeswoman Amy Pederson said the cost was high because, as a public agency, the district must require its contractors to pay certain legally required wages, which increases the costs.

In October, an Olivenhain Municipal Water District employee advised colleagues to sit down before reading a preliminary quote to move a fence around a 4S Ranch recycled water pond. The cost was almost $110,000 — even though the district wasn’t even planning to build a new fence.

“What? Do they have the right site?” one recipient responded. “We’re reusing the fence. Correct? Yikes!”

Another recipient said he knew moving the fence would be expensive, but “it’s crazy.”

“Prevailing wage is a big part of the high price,” he added.

In the end, the district employees decided to leave the fence where it was.

District officials were considering moving the fence at the request of a customer who lived nearby and had complained about aesthetics. Officials thought the cost to move the fence would be nominal because they were planning to reuse the fence and construction was already underway at the site because of a project to realign the pond.

When they got the six-figure quote, they abandoned the idea, General Manager Kim Thorner said.

SAN DIEGO, CA-JANUARY 26, 2012: The Poway Unified School District€™s office in Poway. (Misael Virgen / San Diego Union-Tribune) San Diego Union-Tribune

Poway problems

Emails obtained from the Poway Unified School District revealed two issues — mold at a school, and politicking by employees.

Health technician Tesera Small wrote in March 2015 about a mold infestation at a middle school.

“So, 12 rooms at Mesa Verde have tested positive for mold!!,” she wrote. “Bree’s class had 3 different types and one was airborne. It seems that the parents now know, which I am so happy about. I am sure the you know what is going to hit the fan, as it should!!”

Administrative assistant Courtney Davis Martin replied, “What does airborne mean? Can they and all the kids get longterm sickness from that?”

Christine Paik, a spokeswoman for Poway Unified, told the Union-Tribune that a teacher’s complaint prompted a mold investigation in a classroom at the school. Inspectors found mold hidden behind the vinyl wallpaper.

The school principal notified parents by email and relocated staff and students from the affected rooms, Paik said. Students and staff were allowed to return once mold had been eradicated.

School officials replaced wall covering and made repairs to prevent a recurrence, Paik said. When it rained early this year, school officials again found mold, but it was limited to one room, she said.

Paik said there were two complaints of illness, but she didn’t know if mold was the known or suspected cause.

The Poway district also had an issue last year with employees using work email for political purposes, which is not allowed under state law.

In October, the district warned all employees against using their government email accounts for political purposes, according to coverage in the Voice of San Diego news outlet.

Two months later, a district groundskeeper sent an email to 11 people from his district account, some of which were other employees, containing a disparaging parody letter to “Dear Abby” from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

An employee in the district’s business support services administration was on the recipient list, and forwarded the email to a co-worker and an employee at Palomar Health.

The message contained one of the phrases the Union-Tribune requested — “for crying out loud.”

Poisoned amphibian near Oceanside water treatment plant, identified by the county as a bullfrog.

Dead amphibians

Some incidents revealed by the U-T’s records request came to light because of a tangential use of one of the more common trigger words, “shoot.”

One such email was sent in January of this year, when a county environmental health specialist set up a meeting with a City of Oceanside employee about a hazardous waste spill at the city’s Robert A. Weese Filtration Plant. (“Let’s shoot for 3 p.m.”)

According to a notice of violation the county health official later issued to the city, an estimated 275 gallons of liquid containing the water treatment chemical sodium hydroxide leaked from a storage tank in October 2015. The hazardous waste spilled onto the sidewalk by the tank and flowed down the plant’s driveway to El Paseo, a private road.

The hazardous liquid killed two amphibians identified by the county as bullfrogs and contaminated a section of the road that had to be removed and replaced, according to the notice. The contractor the city hired to clean up the environmental damage removed 100 tons of contaminated dirt, asphalt and other debris.

There should have been containment measures in place around the storage tanks, according to the violation notice. The city had been aware since 2012 that the improvements were needed, but, as of Jan. 22, they were still being designed.

Robert Weese Filtration Plant, Oceanside. Courtesy photo

Alia Ismay contributed to this report