An executive at the company blamed for unsanitary conditions at Metrorail station parking garages says the transit agency is ultimately at fault for its dirty facilities.

Deborah Washington is the chief operating officer of Community Bridge Inc., which had a contract to clean the garages. She said problems arose because Metro didn’t provide effective supervision for the company’s staff.

“Workers would say, ‘I haven’t seen a supervisor here in three days,’” she says.

An Office of the Inspector General report documented “unsafe and filthy” conditions in Metrorail station parking garages. It said some Metro station parking garages went without proper cleaning for “days, weeks, and even months.” It calculated that Metro had spent more than $2.2 million on cleaning services that never actually happened.

The office will present its audit of garage cleaning to Metro’s Executive Committee on Thursday. Other Metro officials received the report late last month.

The report did not name the contractor, though a Metro source with knowledge of the situation confirmed it was Community Bridge to WAMU.

Metro ended its contract with Community Bridge in July, which was costly. In an official response to the inspector general’s findings, Metro says it had to pay for “emergency custodial services” to fill the holes left by Community Bridge workers from August 2019 to January 2020. That cost the agency about $6.4 million for the work — by Metro’s calculation, 2.5 times more than what it would have paid to Community Bridge in the same time period.

Washington said the contract work would have gone more smoothly had Metro allowed Community Bridge to manage its own janitorial services instead of only providing workers for Metro’s in-house staff to manage.

“They are a transportation company, we are a facilities management company,” she said.

The OIG report says cleaners contracted by Metro weren’t cleaning station garages 84 percent of the time, and some contracted employees also weren’t completing their 8-hour shifts. The inspector general’s office says the “root cause of these issues was the lack of oversight by WMATA and contractor officials.”

“There was also little to no implementation of controls over the garage cleaning process, or of the contract employee’s time and attendance,” the OIG summary continued.

Washington disputed that the company’s employees didn’t complete their shifts. She said that one explanation for any lapses in service was the lag time between when Metro requested additional cleaning staff, and when the company was able to find the people to fill the request.

“From the time you put the order in, we can’t give you a person the next day,” she explains.

Washington said that the contract’s termination was “a hard nut to swallow” because the company had worked with Metro for years and had their original contract with the transit agency extended.

According to Washington, the company employed around 200 people when it contracted with Metro. Now, it has 84 workers. Community Bridge’s website lists a number of regional clients, including D.C. and Prince George’s County Public Schools, the District Department of Transportation, Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority and the D.C. Department of General Services.

Washington referred questions about the future of those contracts to the company’s attorney, who didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Washington, who hadn’t seen the OIG report, says that Community Bridge hadn’t “heard anything about restitution” for the $2.2 million dollars calculated in the report.

WAMU has reached out to Metro for comment.

In response to the inspector general report, Metro says it has taken a number of steps to clean the garages. Starting last July, staff from the Office of Plant Maintenance “used the sweeper truck, removed trash, pressure washed stairwells and landings.” They hope to finish pressure washing the garage parking decks by April. Metro will also hire in-house cleaning staff, who the agency says will “better manage and oversee the cleaning of parking facilities.”

A spokesperson for Metro said Monday the agency appreciates “the work of OIG to bring these issues to light.”

This story first appeared on WAMU.