Page 182 - SAC - DPW - AMB 09 05 19

Balhar Sandhu

Tuesday, September 3, 2019 8:34 AM
Out of town September 13th through 17th.

Why are you interested in the Director of Public Works position with the City of Sacramento?
Tell me a bit about what you know about the City.

I lived there for a long time. Went to school there and got my Master's. It appears to be the type of
opportunity that I'm looking for. I've been Director of Public Works for 4-5 years now, and I'm looking
for a more challenging opportunity. Would love to move to Sacramento.

Please describe your most recent position and day-to-day responsibilities.

I do engineering, parking, this seems like a similar position - it's a bigger City. So it's a bigger
challenge. Here I do parking, airport, transit, solid waste, engineering, forestry. I'm Public Works
Director since early 2014, I was appointed. And before that I was a City Engineer for several years. I
oversee the Department. Currently, which includes solid waste, forestry, building services, forestry,
construction, electrical, and parking services. There is also recycling - it compares the divisions at
Sacramento. I manage a budget of $70-75m, we have ongoing CIP. We are contracted out for
garbage and transit. About 300 fulltime and part time.
6 direct reports.

Please describe a project in which you played a major role in creating pathways for
improvement for those in your community.

I came to the City and took over a project I was working on while at CalTrans. Worked for several
years and finally completed the project a year or two ago - there is a lot of development starting to
happen in that area. It's right next to the mall. It's helping with our tax base because people can now
because people can easily access it.

Please describe your experience in evaluating innovation and operational procedure
utilized in a City department and your approach to staying at the forefront of industry.

We are right in the middle of that process. One of the things that we have done in the past, in our
divisions here is we processed everything on paper - so somebody will go out fix the issue and
move to the next one. We were issuing physical work orders which wasn't working. It created a lot of
downtime so we looked into computerizing everything. We contact a vendor to make it automated -
our supervisors will get handheld devices - then they will complete their work and take a picture of
the steeple and everything goes into computers. It saves minimum 1 hour per person, plus it
provides us with more efficiency. If someone is called to the next one - it will save us a lot of window
time.

That was one of the areas. The other things we have done is in the fleets divisions. I heard in
Sacramento there were a lot of miscues for fuel there. We will supervise and get an exception
printed out. Almost impossible to steal the fuel in our City because our system is a two-tiered
computer system, and we recently updated our system.

Please describe your experience in the areas of public transportation and traffic reduction.
This could also apply to the last question you asked. I also oversee the transit division. We have