The cleaning crews didn’t refill bathroom soap or paper towel dispensers. They left trash in office garbage cans, sometimes for days. Courtroom floors weren’t vacuumed and break areas weren’t mopped.
So Gwinnett County fired its cleaning company in April, with nine months left on their year-long contract.
Now, the county is seeking the tens of thousands of dollars they say they are owed from having to find stop-gap cleaners while the contract was rebid.
The company, KeeClean Management, blamed its subcontractors for the issues.
The company plans to sue its subcontractors to make up for its losses, a September letter to Gwinnett officials said, and indicated that the disputes between KeeClean and Gwinnett could be resolved as part of that lawsuit. No one from KeeClean returned phone calls seeking comment Thursday or Friday.
Gwinnett, in a Sept. 29 letter, said it would wait 60 days before filing a lawsuit to recoup its money in the hopes that KeeClean “will be able to amicably resolve its dispute with its subcontractors in the next few weeks.”
The county did not pay KeeClean’s final invoices, totaling nearly $63,000. But a temporary cleaning contract cost $89,288 more than Gwinnett was planning to pay for the service, and the county is still trying to recoup the difference — nearly $27,000 — from KeeClean.
“It’s not settled yet,” Gwinnett spokesman Joe Sorenson said.
KeeClean, based in Connecticut, took over Gwinnett’s janitorial contract in February. Emailed complaints started pouring in almost immediately: reports of cross-contamination in the Meals on Wheels kitchen or county Human Service Centers, chemicals and cleaning supplies that were taken from the buildings they were kept in and toilets that weren’t cleaned. The lack of cleaning was causing odors in county buildings, the emails said.
Additionally, KeeClean wasn’t notifying the county of staff changes and didn’t have at least one English-speaker on each cleaning crew, as was required.
“We were hopeful that this week there would be more stability in the work force and improved quality and greater thoroughness in cleaning,” facilities management director Michael Plonowski said in an email to KeeClean executives less than two weeks after the company took over the janitorial work. “We continue to have great concerns about the company’s lack of organization and resources.”
KeeClean’s annual contract was for $522,024, a 17 percent saving from the previous janitorial contract, according to minutes from the December meeting when it was approved. It was supposed to go from Feb. 1 through the end of January 2016, but was terminated in April. It covered county buildings including the Gwinnett Justice and Administration center, Human Service Centers and Gwinnett County libraries.
The county spent $418,954 on emergency custodial services, from April through October. Last month, commissioners approved a new $534,693 annual contract with Building Maintenance Service, a New York company.
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