In-house customers of Richmond City Hall's print shop have found it takes a long time to get work done -- but then some of the shop's workers have been awfully busy lately.

Surfing the Internet, that is, a city inspector general's report said yesterday.

One employee's computer logged 349,170 Web site visits from December to April, averaging more than 4,700 a day. The employee tried more than 600 times to see inappropriate sites, including one labeled "webdate" and one labeled "pornotube."

One supervisor made 23,310 visits to Internet sites from January to May, while a business manager visited 84,034 sites over those months. A fourth employee went to 74,054 sites. There are about a dozen employees in the shop -- a number that's held steady in recent years, as has its $600,000 annual budget.

But that steady performance isn't matched by printing activity, City Auditor and Inspector General Umesh Dalal said.

A Richmond Times-Dispatch review of print-shop activity found the monthly number of pages the shop printed fell 61 percent since the start of fiscal 2007. The number of photocopies run fell 41 percent.

Dalal reported that the business manager who surfed 84,034 sites earlier this year told him that the main reason for the declining workload was that city agencies were going to outside printers and copy centers to do their work.

"He believed the reason the agencies outsourced was that they experienced a longer turnaround time by the print shop," Dalal said in his report.

"It appears that preventing wasted time in the print shop could cut down on the completion time for print jobs," Dalal observed.

Dalal noted that even after one shop employee was reprimanded for excessive personal use of city computers, supervisors did not monitor Internet visits, adding that the shop's managers "do not appear to supervise employees or set a proper example for them."

City spokesman Michael Wallace said he couldn't comment on what, if any, disciplinary action the employees faced.

"We're taking the city auditor's report very seriously," he said.

Located in the basement of City Hall, the shop designs and prints thousands of pages of city documents a year, in addition to operating a photocopying service for city agencies.
Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or dress@timesdispatch.com.