THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 26, 1995 TAG: 9501260368
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAC DANIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SUFFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
Bureaucracy not working for you? Feel like a voice in the wilderness when it comes to fixing that pothole, quieting that barking dog or mending a busted street light?
Fear not. Starting early next year in Suffolk, you'll have a 24-hour computerized advocate in City Hall.
City leaders are about to start using a piece of computer software to serve as a citizens sounding board for anything from stray cats to trash pickup.
Complaints or suggestions will be put in a computer file and sent to the appropriate city department, which will have a specified number of days to solve the problem. If the city misses the deadline, the computer knows. So does the city manager. And so does the citizen.
Using a myriad of interrelated programs, the software can follow up on complaints, keep a tally of who has called and, in the end, force city departments to be accountable to citizens.
Council members can check how many complaints have come from their boroughs. City staff can spot trends in vandalism or malfunctions. There's even a category for citizens to ``refute unwarranted media reports and criticism'' or complain about an impolite city employee.
When someone calls, city staffers can read policy statements and tell the citizen how long it will take to solve the problem.
The program, named CCAR (Constituency Contact and Response) by its Reno, Nev.-based manufacturer, sends out reports to citizens on the status of their complaints or suggestions.
The reports are not only acknowledgments to citizens, but are also way to keep the complaint from falling into a bureaucratic black hole.
``This kind of systemizing process does more than simply address the concern,'' said City Manager Myles E. Standish. ``It treats the citizen as an individual and gives them an end response.''
The computer program will cut paperwork.
Standish hopes to get the system on line sometime in January, once the staff of the Department of Management Services works out the kinks. Eventually, Standish said, the program will be linked to all city departments via computer, providing the entire city staff with a running tally of how well they are satisfying their citizen-customers.
In the past, Suffolk handled such complaints the traditional way.
When someone called City Hall to get a street light fixed, the call - somehow - was routed to the correct department and addressed - somehow.
No record was kept of the call and, if it got lost, the city never knew, unless the furious citizen called back.
One city in the area, Virginia Beach, decided against a centralized complaint system. Instead, residents are encouraged to call the individual departments. The city is concerned with citizen complaints but, according to city spokeswoman Pamela M. Lingle, the city does not want to fix a system that is not broken.
Suffolk's new system will first be used in the Management Services office. During office hours, calls will be handled personally. And when City Hall is shut down, voice mail or an answering machine will answer the calls.
And now for the bad news. As Standish said: ``This will not be a policy issue-oriented system,'' meaning you can't complain about actions of the City Council. ILLUSTRATION: City Manager Myles E. Standish says residents will get
responses.
by CNB