Drug Tests Bad News For City Drivers For The City Of Spokane Have Relatively High Failure Rate
Copyright 1996, The Spokesman-Review
Spokane city employees who drive public vehicles were more likely to be caught using drugs last year than drivers for other agencies.
The Spokesman-Review reported Thursday that 11 city drivers whose urine was checked in 1995 tested positive for illegal drugs. Two others quit rather than take the tests.
The city gave 345 tests. The employees were selected at random, so some were tested more than once and others were not tested at all.
One former city garbage truck driver said Friday he was tested twice for alcohol and twice for illegal drugs between February and September, and passed each test.
“The fifth time, I refused. … It was belittling to me,” said the man, who was one of the two employees who quit. He spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The city’s failure rate is higher than at Spokane County, Spokane Transit Authority, the state Department of Transportation or the city of Seattle.
Spokane County fared best among the six government employers contacted Thursday and Friday by The Spokesman-Review. None of the 150 tests given to county drivers turned up positive.
The Central Valley School District also had no failures, out of about 45 tests given. Spokane School District 81 pays Laidlaw Transit to provide buses and drivers. A Laidlaw spokesman said no one tested positive in random tests last year, but he didn’t know how many tests were given.
Federal law mandates that employers - both private and public - conduct random drug tests of workers who have commercial driver’s licenses. Some are tested for illegal drugs, others for alcohol.
The testing started last year for the city of Spokane and other employers with more than 50 commercially licensed drivers. It starts this year in Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai County and other agencies with fewer than 50 such employees.
City officials would not release the names of employees who tested positive or say where they worked.
Among government agencies, most commercially licensed drivers work in transportation, public works, parks and solid waste departments. Others drive buses for school districts and transit agencies.
City Finance Director Pete Fortin, who tracks employee statistics, wouldn’t identify the six fired workers until he can notify them that their names may be published. Five others are back on the job on the condition they get treatment and take more drug tests, said Personnel Director Jim Smith.
The former garbage truck driver, who worked for the city for eight years, said he knows at least two workers from the solid waste department who were fired last year for failing drug tests. There may have been others, he said.
The city’s failure rate was 2.9 percent. Dr. Richard Barclay, director of toxicology at Pathology Associates, said the failure rate among all employers who give random drug tests is about 7 percent.
“It seems like companies with general laborers test at a much higher rate than people with higher educations,” said Barclay, whose company does most of the drug testing in Eastern Washington.
For instance, Barclay said, fewer than 1 percent of the employees at Deaconess Medical Center test positive for drugs, while “we’ve tested some companies, construction workers in particular, as high as 20 percent.”
The failure rate also is high for pre-employment tests.
“We had a lot of trouble this summer with (people applying to be) summer help,” said county risk manager Claude Cox. “I think probably one in five tested positive.”
Cox said he was “frankly surprised” that no county employee tested positive.
“I know for a fact that we had at least four employees who we were concerned about,” because they sometimes came to work looking hung over, he said.
Before the testing started, Cox and a union representative met in small groups with county drivers. Employees were told their jobs were on the line if they used drugs.
After that, the four employees who had worried Cox stopped showing up with “Monday-morning eyes.”
“I think there was a lot of self-examination that went on” after the testing started, he said.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Employers testing commercial drivers