Santa Rita Waste/Landscaping Tuscon, AZ

Do not work for this company in Tucson, Arizona. They will steal from your paycheck.

TLDR:
Santa Rita operates a fleet of 5 rolloff trucks and one dump truck between 2 divisions. Builders and Waste. They make everyone buy a set of 75$ shirts despite not being required to wear them. These shirts will fall apart the first time you put them in the wash. As a foreman we each get company phones which is connected to the timeclock app. The NEW payroll system is just straight garbage the app is so underdeveloped that anyone used to cellphone apps would assume that it’s the unfinished project of a 12 year old. The NEW payroll system they use automatically deducts a lunch break from your time clock whether or not you choose to take one. The same time clock system also will not show your clock in and clock out times or prompt you to approve your time sheet. You will only have a count of the total hours you worked that day. Once a new day starts you won’t be able to see yesterday’s hours. You have to rely on your manager to manually remove the lunch break from your timesheet. If there is a mistake you have to hope your supervisor was diligent enough to remember fix it. The old system didn’t have this problem we could see our hours for the entire week along with in and out times. So when you go to the labor board to get whatever hours they WILL owe you. You are screwed with the new time clock system. Not only will Santa Rita not respond to the labor boards requests, you will also not have enough to get the labor board to get your owed pay.



Don’t think your going to work here get some experience then go work for Stambeck. At some point they signed a non-compete agreement. Stambeck will not hire you. Stambeck is in every single housing development they even did the Tucson Gem Show which was a contract that Santa Rita used to do.


Waste is a rolloff operation that also does concrete washouts. Most of the trucks came from Penske with PACCAR engines and are at the average age where they need DPF rebuilds. Santa Rita completely refuses to put money into their equipment. It was like pulling teeth to get my truck into the shop when it finally derated itself after several months of poor performance. Only one truck in the fleet has the pump and storage tank needed to siphon off concrete water from the washouts. Depending on how much the driver cares. The other trucks are either somewhat clean because the driver took the time to back onto the new washout and crack open the door or looks like a house painters boombox.


The rolloff dumpsters fall into 3 grades. Trash, ill fitting to the rails or useable but most don’t even have the correct company logo on them.


The trash grade rolloffs are completely beyond their usable life and represent the largest portion of the containers. They don’t close, the floors have holes or the sides are rotted away. Most don’t have the same style of locking mechanism, critical parts are missing or have been “repaired” by the “fabrication company” Santa Rita likes to use. But they still get used. Most of the concrete washouts fall in this category. Imagine a concrete washout with a door now imagine everything is on it is broken. The hinges are rusted out, the binder used to close it has long broken off and its full of used restaurant oil. We would have been better off carrying sprayers on the truck to spray them at the job site. Most of that oil ended up on the truck rails and public roads when we prepped the washouts at the yard.


Then there are the ones that don’t even fit the trucks, they are way too short. There is a solid 3 feet between the door and the end of the rails. These are more likely to get trash stuck on the rails and in the drive axle airlines.


The useable ones aren’t bad unless they have been “repaired”. The fabrication company that Santa Rita likes to use clearly would much rather be making lifted truck suspensions.


A lot of wastes customers are undesirables. People that live way out in Three points, home flippers that need containers in place that make it a pain to get to like crumbling asphalt roads on hills and just two of the major home builders.


Builders is so unorganized. In terms of job capability in town you have AAA, Santa Rita, Brightview and then everyone else. Builders has one dump truck, two rolloffs and a water truck. The dump truck is an Sterling with a Mercedes engine and yes the plastic interior is just gone. The transmission will jam and you won’t be able to shift out of gears. Its been ticketed twice this year, once for a missing battery box cover and improper chaining of a trailer and another time for a non functioning light system. Driver got put out of service for that last one. The drivers in builders division don’t have experience, they got their CDLs while working there or were hired right out of a prison program. I had to convince the driver of the sterling not to take it back out the next day because it still wasn’t fixed. Santa Rita is literally right across the street from Tucson Truck and Trailer parts. We don’t keep any lights or even the most basic truck parts in stock.

 

What do the builders rolloff trucks do? We put skidsteers in them, drive out to the jobsite then use the skidsteers to fill them up with spoils. Rolloff containers aren’t designed for this use day in and day out. If you completely fill up the rolloff you’re going to be around 72k but the trucks only legal up to 66k. When you go to dump the container, depending on the design you will damage the container. If the container has been “repaired” it will have a locking bar that extend out past the end of the rails and into the ground getting bent each time you dump. If Chuy the super catches you dumping he is going to complain that you leave a trail of material. The only thing he has ever driven is that clapped out sterling so yeah a long and short container isn’t going to dump like a short and tall dump truck. Don’t expect him to figure that out.


In builders your day is going to start like this. Your job is to clean up spoils, deliver or move gravel and steal dirt when needed. Honestly a big part of your day is finding dirt to steal.


You better make sure that you can take that dirt. The driver of the water truck took some gravel from some pig and that pig went to the site super pissed off flashing his badge and we had to replace it. The pig still complained about what we delivered in an effort to get more gravel out of us. Given Tanners inexperience in handling customer’s complaints we all heard about the “dirty gravel” we delivered.


Spoils are the trash dirt piles that build up from construction process. It usually contains bits of concrete bags and wood beams its basically dirt filled with trash. What happens when its not dirty? Well I’ll tell you about that later.


You’re going to get to work first thing in the morning and Chuy is going to have no idea where to send you. They only run off the work orders for the day that morning. So he is going to sit there and go “umm… umm sabes que go to….”. Once he figures out where to send you, go out to the jobsite and pray there is work to do. When you find some spoils but not concrete.


This is important, one time I sent Chuy a bunch of pictures one day of a pile of concrete, it was a full driveway they ripped out an easy 3 loads. We have removed concrete in the past. I even called to confirm if he wanted it removed. I start on it and a few hours later he calls back irritated saying some nonsense about concrete needs a separate billing.


Go find the nearest lot sign if it is even still there. If the lot isn’t an active home site we can’t bill Lenner,Matmy, LGI or whoever is building. So when that happens is we use the nearest active lot number because we are required to keep the job sight clean. Often times though we aren’t contracted for the entire development.


If I didn’t know how to pull realtor maps off the web my job would have been so much harder. A number might exist on their map but wont on the realtors map due to how subdivision units work. So the Inevitable back and forth starts out with you telling them you can’t find the lot. Chuy will get flustered because he can’t explain where the lot is. Then you call Sonja whose like “Yeah I have a lot map, it’s on my map”. Trying to get a picture of that map is like trying to get a peek at the KFC recipe. Most time Sonja won’t even pickup the phone but she is the only one who can put work orders on your schedule. Make a choice either sit and wait for her to respond or risk loading up material you have to dump out.


If you come across clean dirt do not inform anyone especially Chuy. Chuy has side deals going on where he dumps clean dirt. There was one guy Tim who wanted dirt dumped in a hole he had on a lot he owned. He would ##### constantly about us not dumping directly into the hole. Chuy promised him that we would dump into the hole and that he would come by later with a skid loader to level everything out. There was another house he wanted dirt dumped at. It was down an alley way that a trash truck would struggle getting down. I started mixing trash into the dirt so I wouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense. The dump truck driver we had however would dump everything on Tim’s lot. I mean spoils with pvc pipe sticking out of it, wood beams and trash, the works. There was another dump site we were instructed to use near a RV park in Sahuarita with “no dumping”, “dumps closed” signs everywhere.


The Fabricator they use is such a joke. I had a trailer that seriously needed work. Hole in the floor, the gate was leaking gravel all over the road and the gate was also bouncing out of the latches. You would be going down a dirt road and it would bounce right out and smack the other side of the container. The door on the container kept bouncing out of the locks because when they “fixed it” last time they didn’t put a top latch on the gate. Instead of recreating the orignail locking mechanism they went and inventer their own. So on a bumpy road the gate would just bounce out of the latches. To make matters worse these geniuses cut a metal hook from a ratchet binder in half and welded it to the side of the container to hold the chain. I pointed out how stupid that design was and the fabricator wrapped it in some bs cutsy loop a called it a day. The bears in Kaibab National Forest would be better fabricators than these clowns. So I was told to explain the problem to the shop so I gave him a list of what I needed done, and exactly how I wanted it done. The guy got really pissy he really didn’t want to do the work. Unbeknownst to me the container had been to the shop before for the exact same issues. The company didn’t want to pay for it then and they didn’t want to pay for it now. Management by numbers, That end of year bonus is 500$ for foremen and I can only image what it is for the office staff.


Management is completely useless, the largest collection of what I call “Office Gentry” except for one guy. One of Santa Ritas problems is that its located at Grant and Oracle. It’s not Grant and Alvernon bad but its honestly not somewhere you want to be at night. As CDL holders we used to be able to park in the yard but then they went and bought more trucks. That rule doesn’t apply to some office workers though. If you want a parking spot in the poorly marked lot off grant you need to get there early. Like 45 minutes before your shift early. If you suck at parking or if some guy leaves and it looks like you suck at parking you’re going to get a warning then towed. Don’t park on Saguaro or your cat is getting stolen. That whole area is reservation land.

 

If you need to see your boss when you get in first thing in the morning they won’t be there. 100% probability they will be clocked in like Ryan and Andy but won’t be there. 200% probability if they drive a company truck. Brent runs the builders and he is completely ####### useless. He is at that age where you start smoking cigars so you can schmooze up to management but his choice of cigar shows he has no idea what he is doing. I watched him ask another department head a question while he did everything he could to make himself appear smaller. Hunched over, hands in his pockets kinda looking at the other guy or the ground. He missed two initial meetings he had with me. Then when I finally started working for his department I asked for a chain to strap down the skidloader. It took 3 months and two polite reminders and then the manager from the waste division surprised me and went out and got me a chain. A week later the strap I had been using broke. I watched David, Chuys boss push out out a foreman and jumped into his skidloader and cleared out a lot. That foreman knew what he was doing.


This was characteristic of both David and Chuy they would spend most of the day dicking around talking to workers, jump into skidloaders and not really accomplish much in them. Then turn around, drive company trucks off to another job site and send you a video of 7 lots they want cleared and 4 of those lots would be blocked off by the blocks the mason workers had ordered. You would have no way of accessing those lots and they’d still complain you didn’t get them done. I honestly felt bad for Sonja she went home sick one day and they still had her working because no one else can put lots on your schedule.


They owe me unpaid wages that I’ll never see but at least people will now know the kind of ####show they have going.

 

Already tried. Labor department said I have enough for a civil case but not enough to get them to do anything about it.