Citizens Agenda on City Services

Is it any wonder people complain about Philadelphia city services? Just look at the trends.

To pay for soaring costs in a few budget areas, the city has whittled staff and services in many other departments: from recreation to streets to revenue to procurement.

It is called robbing Peter to pay Paul, if you’ll excuse the cliché.

Actually, it may be robbing Peter to jail Paul because the bulging city prisons are one of the biggest rising costs.

In terms of (inflation adjusted) dollars and employees, every category of city services – except public safety and social services – has gone down in the last five years. 

Add to this another concern: The city has been neglecting its infrastructure. Sounds boring, sure – unless your recreation-center roof leaks or your health-center bathroom won’t work. Then you feel it. As you do when you hit a pothole or cross a crumbling bridge.

Usually this work is paid through the sale of long-term bonds. Why not pay for it over 20 years if it is going to last 20 years or more?  But the city admits its capital spending falls far short of what’s needed to maintain infrastructure properly – about two-thirds short.

It’s not that the city isn’t selling bonds. It is. But, a lot of that debt has gone to finance pet projects, from stadiums to Mayor Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative and his cultural program.

In short, the city can perform the basics, but it has stripped itself of the capacity to do more.

The other piece of the problem has to do with attitude. The city bureaucracy rarely treats taxpayers as customers who deserve service simply because they pay the bills. It responds to clout, to pressure, to agitation – not to an ideal of service. So citizens have to know whom to call or beg someone with juice to do it for them.

City Council members do more to perpetuate this syndrome than to fix it. In fact, they (their staffs, really) function as the chief go-betweens whose phone calls rouse the bureaucracy to act. That’s how the pols collect chits from voters, which they cash in at election time. It’s a lousy system, but it’s deeply embedded, producing levels of service and cynicism that no city intent on greatness can tolerate.

Here’s how to fix it:

The No 1. Priority

Get into the business of effective, fair and responsive service delivery.

Why it matters: It helps preserve neighborhoods. It improves the city’s image. City government exists to provide services, so why not do the job well? The city also has to overcome the impression that enforcement is based on whom you know.

What to do: Drive home the message to city workers that service is Job One. How? Training, training, training. Good departments and great employees are sprinkled throughout city government. Use them to teach by positive example. Emulate the best training approaches used in the private sector. Find better ways to track service requests, and create accountability for serving customers. Reward innovation, efficiency and best practices.

Near-term actions

Call 311: This is like a 911 line, but this call center is a clearinghouse for everyday requests for service or attention to problems. The program yields a centralized database of calls, making it easier to check on follow-through. Make it possible to use e-mail as well as phone calls to register complaints or make requests. Citizens love this idea, but with two provisos: 311 must be easy to use and follow-through must be visible. They all have too much experience with fighting through “voice-mail hell” at City Hall to leave a message that then disappears into “a black hole.”

Set up CityStat: This computerized system for analyzing service delivery complements the 311 system and tries to ensure the follow-through and accountability that citizens crave. It provides data on work done and work that needs to be done. It lets the mayor and public know which departments respond best and deserve praise, and which don’t and may need a shake-up. Mayor Nutter is intent on setting up the system here. Citizens would like it to include regular meetings with neighborhood leaders, to report on results and take suggestions for improvement. Citizens desperately want to know who in city government is responsible for providing which services to their neighborhood.

Take CLIP citywide: The Community Life Improvement Program is a coordinated, inter-agency effort to enforce city codes with regard to quality-of-life violations such as property neglect, vandalism and graffiti. It began in the Sixth Council District and is considered a huge success there. The theory is: better to fix the problem now, rather than wait until it is more serious. The money spent up front saves money down the road. It is an anti-blight effort that preserves property values and should be expanded to other districts.

Hello, Internet: Make routine interactions with city government fully accessible and doable by computer. To be fair, www.phila.gov has made major strides in this direction, but more can be done. The site should include a simple, comprehensive primer for citizens on who does what in city government, how to seek help effectively, and what citizens are responsible for doing to ensure good service delivery (e.g. how and when to put trash out properly).

People power: Hire more inspectors. The city has just enough to respond to complaints but not to proactively enforce codes. This is an example where you need more people to get the job done right.

Language power: Make sure the city is ready to explain its rules and services in all the languages spoken by significant segments of the city’s population.

Long-term efforts

Grow some carrots: Give incentives to departments to improve performance. This goal may involve long-term effort because the City Charter now forbids departments from keeping revenue they yield. The money all must go back into the city’s general fund. So charter change may be required to create ways to reward departments that deliver the best services or save money through wise efficiencies. A shorter-term step: Expand the city program to reward employees who come up with good ideas.

Learn to take advice: Be far more willing as a city to seek out, learn from and adapt best practices from other cities and the private sector.

Digital deputies: Enlist neighborhoods in enforcement. The Center City District, a superbly effective quasigovernmental service provider, does it with handheld computers that feed information about possible violations into a computer. Take the idea to scale.  Hire the CCD to train volunteers in other neighborhoods in the task.

Cut out the middleman: Also known as City Council. Get City Council members out of the business of prying routine services from city departments. Whether they realize it or not, Council members have better things to do. A government that is fair and responsive doesn’t need to be cajoled into doing its core job. This system promotes a narrow, short-term focus on the part of Council members and actually gives them a vested political interest in poor service delivery.

Ideas from citizen forums

Someone to watch over me: Create an independent, taxpayer-paid Office of Consumer Service to investigate complaints about service failures or the performance of city employees. Rather than begging favors from Council members, some civic leaders said they’d much rather have an entity such as this whose job it is enforce accountability, with no quid pro quos. This could be an aspect of the 311/CityStat system.

Line up the lines: Get city departments all to use the same map for dividing the city into service districts. Now, each department draws its own lines, creating a crazy quilt that frustrates and confuses citizens (and, often, city workers). Doing this would go a long way to improving communication among agencies, which citizens now see as often working at cross-purposes. 

YouTube to the rescue: Create a Web site where citizens can post video documenting problems, from trash-strewn lots to abandoned cars to dangerous buildings to lollygagging workers. Each video would come with a counter tracking the days until the city responds.

(Illustration by Tim Ogline)