Alvin Scott made a habit of covering the shifts of fellow solid waste workers who were struck down by summer heat.

The former Department of Public Works employee said he watched people suffer strokes, fainting, vomiting and severe dehydration — all to survive a day of tossing trash in the back of a truck.

In Scott’s six years picking up waste for the Eastern Sanitation Yard on Bowleys Lane, he said he could not recall his employer providing water or time for breaks on hot days. So when he heard last Friday that 36-year-old Ronald Silver II died of heatstroke while picking up waste along an afternoon route, Scott was not surprised.

“It’s one of those jobs where they don’t care about you out there,” said Scott, who said he left DPW in 2019 due to an injury. “You pass out and they would go get another man.”

This year, more than 1,000 Marylanders have sought medical assistance for heat-related illness. Emergency room and urgent care visits for heatstroke, heat exhaustion and hyperthermia are the highest recorded in the last five years, according to the health department.

Yet, since 2019, the Maryland agency responsible for investigating unsafe work environments initiated only 32 inspections into employers reported for heat stress-related issues, according to data obtained by The Baltimore Banner.

The absence of inspections does not mean employees spent the last five years unaffected by heat exposure, said Devki Virk, commissioner of Maryland’s Division of Labor and Industry, which oversees the state’s Occupational Safety and Health agency (MOSH). It only means they have not received a report, she said.

The Department of Labor was unable to provide numbers on how many reports of heat-related concerns MOSH has received since 2019. Reports are submitted from a wide variety of sources, from federal partners to phone calls and emails, Virk said.

Employers are only required to report incidents that violate safety standards to MOSH. But until this summer, Maryland had not proposed rules identifying the heat-related hazards likely to harm workers.

Multiple experts say the lack of safety enforcement by the state agency stems from years of neglect under former Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration. When Gov. Wes Moore inherited the agency in 2023, about 28% of staff positions had been left vacant. While Moore’s administration tried to rebuild — reducing vacancies, raising penalties on employers violating workers’ safety and pushing standards on workforce heat protection — the agency remains strapped for resources.

Stuart Katzenberg, director of growth and collective bargaining for AFSCME Council 3, called the lack of MOSH inspections “terribly disappointing.” His group, along with city council members and Moore, have called for an investigation into the death of Silver. Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott on Wednesday acknowledged problems within DPW and promised to hold those responsible for harming employees to account.

Katzenberg described MOSH under Hogan as “hollowed out.” The former governor created an eight-year barrier to implementing heat protections, Katzenberg said. In Hogan’s first year in office, the number of formal complaints investigated by MOSH dropped from 106 to 92. That number later dipped to levels lower than those under previous Gov. Martin O’Malley or Moore, falling to 72 in 2019 and diving another 29% the following year, according to state budget plans.

Michael Ricci, a representative for Hogan, said the administration deeply appreciated the work of employees who helped navigate turnover in the agency resulting from the pandemic. He cited a report issued by the state agency that showed MOSH meeting the majority of their inspection enforcement goals and their fatality inspection goals.

There are five fewer safety compliance officers and three fewer inspectors than needed to match the standards set by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration agency, according to a federal review of MOSH. The review also discovered staff failed to respond to complaints of serious safety violations filed using Maryland’s online reporting forum between October 2022 though September 2023.

Attracting workers and retaining them have been chronic issues, said Jamie Mangrum, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Labor. She did not comment on how the vacancies are affecting MOSH’s ability to investigate employers.

Only one of the 32 heat-related inspections carried out by MOSH since 2019 involved waste management, with the majority targeting food service industries, according to Department of Labor data.

A bill passing through the state legislature aims to set an enforceable heat standard, as do rules published in the state register last week. The proposed changes set a baseline for what employers must provide to protect workers, including at least 32 ounces of water per day at no cost, access to shaded rest areas and at least ten minute breaks every two hours spent working in temperatures over 90 degreest.

The rules will go through a 30-day comment period, which then leaves commissioner Virk 16 days to revise them before they are adopted.

The rules also give employers options for meeting the new benchmarks. Acclimatization plans to help workers adapt to the temperature can either be a mix of cooling measures or a gradual rise in their time spent in heat. Health care professionals and labor advocates participated in drafting the minimum requirements to keep sites cool, and give both inspectors and workers a standard barometer on what qualifies as a safety violation, Virk said.

The Maryland rules as currently stated are more aggressive than the heat standards proposed by the OSHA in recent weeks, according to Debbie Berkowitz, a now retired senior policy advisor and chief of staff for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It will hopefully be finalized faster, she said, as the federal proposals are likely years away from being implemented.

“I’m sad we didn’t have this standard already because maybe [Silver’s] death would have been prevented,” Berkowitz said.

Despite efforts to improve safety, workers are doubtful that conditions will change. Two recent reports by the Baltimore inspector general revealed dilapidated water fountains, bathrooms and air conditioners within Public Works facilities, including the former workplaces of both Silver and Scott.

Scott said he tried to report the issues he saw to supervisors more than once. It’s unclear to him whether changes were made.

The Department of Public Works did not respond to requests for comment.

Looking back, Scott said he got out of the yard relatively unscathed, with one injury from falling off a truck. On hot days, he still remembers the older men inside the Bowleys Lane locker room, dizzy from the heat. He wonders if they will ever find a way to cool down.

The governor of Maryland says that as the state works to build upon its marijuana legalization law, he will continue to “advocate for a sane and a standard federal policy,” including banking reform so that small cannabis businesses have access to capital.

In an Instagram Live conversation with Hope Wiseman, founder of the marijuana retailer Mary and Main, Gov. Wes Moore (D) said on Wednesday that while he’s committed to ensuring that social equity is integral to Maryland’s cannabis market, and his recent mass pardon for past marijuana and paraphernalia convictions is part of that, it remains critical that federal reform advances.

“What we’re doing state of Maryland is revolutionary,” he said. But “there are parts of this country that are behind us and on federal law.”

“So one thing that I know that we will continue to do—and I know a lot of our partners will continue to do—we’re going to continue advocating for changes within the federal system,” Moore said, adding that the Biden administration has made a “major move” by proposing to reschedule cannabis because it made “absolutely no sense” to classify it in the same category as heroin.

“There is movement, and there’s momentum. That’s happening,” he said. “But we have to make sure we’re continuing to advocate for a sane and a standard federal policy in the way that we’re addressing these issues.”

Wiseman also brought up the fact that while moving marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) would allow state-licensed cannabis businesses to take federal tax deductions, there’s still a need to address the lack of banking access for the industry, a situation that makes it “a difficult place to navigate.”

Moore said that banking is “a component that I think sometimes people miss when it comes access, and why it’s so difficult to get access to capital to entrepreneurs when you have different rules between different states and the feds.”

“There’s a whole lot that can be done on the state side. There’s a whole lot that our individual states can do,” he said. “But one of the really important things that has to be done with all of us on the state side as well is you have to make sure that the federal conversation is getting pushed as well.”

The governor has been discussing his vision for cannabis reform frequently in recent weeks, as he promotes his recent mass pardon forgiving more than 175,000 marijuana and paraphernalia convictions.

That clemency was about more than addressing the public policy consequences of criminalization,” Moore said in an earlier interview. As someone who was exposed to the criminal legal system at an early age, and having been a medical cannabis patient himself, he said there’s an important personal psychological impact of attaining that relief.

Last month, Moore and the president of the NAACP also promoted the state’s historic mass marijuana pardon, which they said would unlock the economic potential of people targeted by criminalization. But the governor also stressed the need to get the word out about next steps for the majority of pardon recipients whose records weren’t automatically expunged by his clemency move.

Moore has also gained praise from the White House and other officials such as Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) for his cannabis clemency move.

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Meanwhile, since Maryland’s adult-use cannabis market launched in July of last year, licensed retailers have sold more than $1.1 billion worth of legal marijuana products, including more than $700 million to adult consumers and $400 million in medical marijuana, the Maryland Cannabis Administration (MCA) said last month.

During the first quarter of 2024, meanwhile, the state collected nearly $15 million in marijuana sales tax revenue—an increase of less than 0.7 percent compared to the previous quarter.

Aside from cannabis, the governor in May also signed a pair of bills into law to establish a psychedelics task force that will study legal access to substances like psilocybin and DMT.

Delaware Officials Will Start Accepting Adult-Use Marijuana License Applications Ahead Of Schedule This Month