An "Anonymous" poster made the following comment this afternoon on the blog:
People dont seem to understand, once residents call 311, they refer complaint over to appropriate department. It is not the 311 representative that goes out to take care of the issue. It really upsets me that because the departments are not doing their job the 311 call center is being blamed. Definatley get your facts straight before you start pointing fingers!!!!
I think the poster needs to take a step back and get their facts straight, I'm pretty comfortable with mine.
Last week I called 311 and was on hold for 9 minutes and 32 seconds before before a live person answered and handled the call. The commenter seems to want to place the "blame" on the individual departments rather than the 311 program. If I recall correctly, when 311 was originally shoved down our throats we were told that 311 would force efficiency on Hartford's operations because calls would be tracked and followed up on.
I don't really care about the "blame game", but 311 isn't working. This link will take you to an interactive map that tells the whole story about 311, click to go to hartford.gov's 311 tracking map. I recommend you check out the map quickly though , the link will probably be disabled soon.The map on hartford.gov is a "push pin" type map that has color coded dots indicating 311 complaints or "cases". The green dots are "closed" cases, the orange dots are "open" or unresolved cases. It is hard to see the green dots since they are almost obliterated by the orange dots. The telling part though is that if you click on an orange dot, it shows you the date the complaint was recieved. Many of the cases aren't recent, some date back almost a year, if not more.
A residents issue being unresolved for a year doesn't sound like the height of efficiency to me. Anyone willing to take the time and effort to report a problem deserves that the issue be dealt with in a timely manner. Removing graffiti reported January 12, 2010 does not seem very responsive.
So, to the "Anonymous" poster, "right back at ya". Get your facts straight before you try to justify your 311 job.
7 comments:
I believe the 311 system only records and tracks the citizen complaints. Aren't the cases referred to different departments for resolution? If this is true how can the 311 system be the problem? Maybe making someone in the departments accountable for problem resolution might help.
Kevin...the probable oversight board will get rid of it, if the administration will not.
Before 311, you would call a department and they would tell you they would fix your issue. If the issue was not taken care of, there was no way to verify that the original call even existed. With 311, you call and the person sets up the case and then sends the issue to the department. If the department doesn't get on it, there is a record saying how long the wait has been.
The process is only as good as the people holding the departments accountable. So if you have a couple hundred incidents at over 90 days, it's safe to say that the Supervisor/Manager/Dept Head needs a talking to.
Kevin's issue of waiting x amount of time for a person is something that happened with too much regularity in the days before 311.
Kevin, I agree with you 100%. It is a waste of time, money and energy. Most of the 311 people put you on hold after you make your complaint to call the City Council and/or someone that they may who the complaint should be referred to. I suggest putting people back to work in their respective departments to handle the calls. People are tired of voicemail. It is the greatest way to ignore everyone's concerns. I would like to know what my tax dollars are being spent on since service is definitely not one of them. Each year our services get cut because the blue collar workers have to be laid off in order to accommodate the salaries of upper management. The people that appear to think 311 is the a great avenue are either people who worked for 311 or people who have friends in 311. It doesn't work so fix it.
Another waste is procurement. The City needs a procurement manager with experience in public policy.
I put in a 311 call to have marble counter tops put in my kitchen and nobody responded to me yet.
311, Mercury Commerce, are just a couple of programs put forward and are going nowhere. Millions of tax payers dollars wasted on programs that clearly don't work. The people defending these programs are the people beneftting and making a salary.
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