Article content continued

“That surprised us,” Hughes said.

OC Transpo management discontinued the practice after the auditor raised the issue last summer.

While 26 per cent of lost items were eventually returned to the original owner, the rest were either auctioned off in an annual charity sale or claimed by transit employees.

John Manconi, the general manager of transit services, told reporters afterward that the annual cost to manage lost-and-found was formerly about $70,000 per year, but that amount fell to about $40,000 per year after Heartwood House won the contact, which is in the process of being re-tendered.

Meanwhile, cancellation alerts — which are posted to the transit service’s website and a special Twitter account — are sometimes “issued after the next scheduled bus should have gone by,” according to Hughes’s annual report.

For example, in the first two weeks of May 2014, 33 per cent of cancellation alerts were sent out 20 minutes after the scheduled first stop of the cancelled route.

That’s a problem, Hughes said, because the whole point of the alert system is to give transit users a heads up so they can catch another bus, if possible, or make alternative arrangements to get where they’re going.

“If that notification comes one minute or 20 minutes after the bus was supposed to arrive, then it is of little value,” he said.

Manconi said OC Transpo is exploring whether new software could help automate what is now a manual service.

“We are following the right procedures. We need to do it quicker if we can,” he said.