A July 21 press release from Cambridge City Manager Glenn Steckman let residents know they should feel “confident that they can submit complaints, issues, requests for help, or general observations, and receive timely responses and action.” The most effective way for submitting comments, the release states, is on ChooseCambridge.com, where a resident can find the option “Report a Citizen Concern.”
The Spy asked Steckman and City IT Coordinator Dale Price for further details about the new option and why it’s easier and more effective than calling City Hall or posting on social media.
How does the citizen concern option on the website work?
STECKMAN: Well, you go on the city website and right there on the front page, is a place where you can click on Report a Concern. So, anyone who is comfortable working with computers can find it on there, anywhere, with any computer they have, or a phone. This allows folks to access city government 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And, depending on which area you click, there are streets, there are police, and there are neighborhood concerns. Then that report is sent to three or four people so that they can start looking into the situation that the person wanted to report on.
Click here to see new system.
The benefit also is it creates a record so that we also are able to go back and very quickly follow up on how the report was dealt with. It also reduces a lot of paperwork where things get lost in paper. But I think it really helps direct the complaint or concern to the area that the people are responsible for.
If they want a reply to their report, how fast can the people expect a response?
PRICE: If they add an e-mail address to the form, I would say right away — but not right away, not immediately. It would be sometime next business day from if they request an update. The department responsible for it should be able to get to them next business day.
That’s pretty fast.
STECKMAN: Well, it depends also on the level of complaint. We may say we have received it, and then we are looking into it, and it may take a couple days to have the correct follow up. It’s like if someone reports a neighbor, their grass is a foot high or there’s trash on their neighbor’s lots. We have to send a code officer out to look at it. And then that code officer has to give seven days to abate the issue, to correct it. So, we can’t say that you’re going to make a complaint on grass cutting, and it’s going to be cut the next day. There are processes that we have to go through. But we want to make sure the community looks nice, if we’re just talking about that type of issue.
Now, they can also click in and report signs missing, which gives us immediate notice that we have a sign missing. And if it’s a critical sign, it’s going to have to be replaced as soon as possible. For instance, a stop sign is knocked down, we want to know that so we can get the stop sign as immediate as you can put back up, because we don’t want any issues resolving potholes, et cetera. If your corner street sign with your name is missing, let us know, and then we’ll make a new plate to put up there. Also, identifying it will help us, from a budgeting standpoint, to identify the issues that we may need to start budgeting money for — if we’re having a lot of sign damage or complaints about signs that we’re going to have to find the money to fix them. It may not be immediate, but it’s going to happen.
How did people complain to the city before this?
PRICE: I would say the largest majority of our complaints came in by phone. You know, it would come into a secretary, then it would have to filter through each department to get to the right ones if there were multiple departments. And then recently we had the form center Citizen’s Complaint area on the city’s website. And with the website redesigned, we made it a lot easier for citizens to find it. And it’s right there on the front page. And we also reworked it to make it a lot smoother and going to the right departments.
STECKMAN: Well, I’ll give you another example. Let’s say someone talks to a Council member. The Council member then talks to me or sends me an e-mail. But there could be a lag, or the Council member can come into a meeting on Monday. Then it comes to me. Then I have to turn around and send it to the appropriate department. We’re trying to make this seamless and not as many stops on the way. Things get lost and we want to make sure we have an accurate record of how many complaints we’re getting, what type of complaints, so it tells us of an issue we may not know about because we have not put all this information together in a collective way.
And I just think it allows people, when they see something, and it’s after business hours and they forget about it, you know, they’re going to call the next day and then we’ve forgotten about it. They now go home, send us the notice, and we can begin to address the issue.
Well, I think that answers my next question, “Why is it better than calling in and talking to somebody immediately?”
PRICE: Also lost in translation.
How do you mean?
PRICE: Like Glenn said, he goes to the Council person and then the Council person tries to interpret what the citizen might be trying to get to, and then it goes to Glenn and then, the more people touch that story, the more it can get turned around. This way, the citizen can go in and type exactly what they’re trying to say in the section on the code.
STECKMAN: I don’t know if you ever did something like this when you were in school, and I was in school a long time ago. But the teacher would do a demonstration of how things get lost in communication. [Someone would] tell [something to] the first person in the aisle.
Yeah, the telephone game.
STECKMAN: You know, it’s going all the way back, and it would be as it went back down the row of students. It was always interesting how the sixth student or the last person in that row interpreted what was originally said to the student in the first seat. And you know, it happens because we all hear things through different lenses — and I should say, lenses are not the word — but we hear things differently, based on how we understand things or how we interpret things.
How many people have used the system so far? You only put out the press release on July, have you gotten any responses yet?
STECKMAN: We are just advertising it now. It has been set up for a while. We just did major improvements to the website to make it more customer friendly, and then we were seeing a lot of complaints coming in through Council members and, really, the Council member can enter the complaint. But we want to try to streamline it so it gets to us faster versus going through all these hoops.
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