On-the-clock city employees drank at bars near O’Hare International Airport and then returned to the airport for the remainder of their shifts, an investigation by the city’s Office of Inspector General found.
The city watchdog investigation details numerous instances of alcohol consumption by airport employees during working hours. In one case, several on-the-clock Aviation Department employees attended a party thrown by an off-duty colleague where they imbibed “beer, cocktails, and shots of liquor” before returning to work at the airport. In other instances, Aviation Department supervisors bought alcohol for their employees while out to lunch, the report said.
The OIG’s investigation involved a total of 14 subjects, most of whom were or are employed by the city’s Aviation Department, which oversees O’Hare and Midway airports.
The watchdog determined that a total of seven employees made “false statements” to the OIG over the course of its investigation, the details of which were released Wednesday as part of the OIG’s first quarter report.
In addition to drinking while they were supposed to be working, the OIG found that current and former Aviation Department employees “took extended breaks without proper authorization, falsified their time records, spent hours at a time idling while on the clock, demonstrated incompetence in their managerial duties, stole City property, and lied to OIG during an official investigation.”
For instance, two Aviation Department supervisors and a laborer under their purview “routinely spent an hour or more at a nearby gym while on the clock, stopping for a sit-down lunch afterwards” before finally returning to work “hours” after they left, the OIG report said.
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In another case, security footage showed a laborer “sitting in their car in the employee parking lot for more than two and one half hours after returning from an extended lunch break where they had been drinking, then returning to work just in time to clock out for the day,” the report found.
One laborer stole a parking placard and made a copy of it in order to park in a secure lot, the OIG found.
At the time the OIG completed its investigation, 11 of its subjects still worked at the Aviation Department, while the other three worked either at the city’s Department of Transportation or Department of Water Management.
The OIG recommended the city departments either discipline or discharge — and bar from future city employment — the subjects of the investigation.
According to the report, the departments preliminarily agreed with those recommendations.
Spokespeople for CDA and DWM said the departments do not comment on personnel matters. A spokesperson for CDOT did not respond to a request for comment.