Many of our residents are proud! Proud of their neighbourhood; proud of their little patch they call home. We’ve used Snap Send Solve or called the Council requesting a service, but are we receiving bang for our ratepayer’s buck? I think not!
Deborah Glass-Ombudsman has announced that most complaints received through her agency relate to Prisons and ... Local Councils!
My experiences are mixed; frustrations over parking tickets because of confusing parking signs, requesting trees be replaced in tree squares (it took 3 years and 6 phone calls plus numerous online requests)!.Weeding in laneways that are an unhealthy nesting places for discarded syringes, inadequate lighting in laneways which means they become dirty (this is usually Powercorp but laneway clean up belongs to Councils), small common gardens on street corners are left a mess, graffiti, blocked drains, dumped rubbish, and filthy and broken public toilets. The list is endless. Council seem to have a lot on their plate, but why should basic customer service be compromised?
And how does the customer service system work at Council? Those familiar with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and other software that supports complaint/request tracking, also collates information for KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). It’s easy to ‘fudge’ the statistics, IT departments across the world have been doing it for years, you lodge a request, they fix the problem, the ticket is closed and recorded as a ‘success’, and then its broken again a day later, only for you to lodge yet another request. And this is where the frustration begins.
We’ve recently painted the fences in our laneway with a standard grey/cream paint from Bunnings, frustrated by the lack of ability to stop the graffiti; our neighbours also agreed for us to paint their fence. To be fair, Council can only act with owner’s approval - it took us 5 minutes to get that - and harmony has returned to the hood. No more endless graffiti tagging!
This weekend was the last of me looking at yet another filthy laneway opposite us, after numerous requests, I grabbed the whipper-snipper and did it myself, followed by 20 minutes of an annoying blower vac moment on a sunny Saturday. I smile with pride, the hood is looking good!
Why am I doing it? Sadly, tickets are raised, tickets are closed, the work just doesn’t get done, if it does, its often a poor effort. We’ve had dumped rubbish piling up for almost a week, as we know it grows overnight and someone kindly dropped bags of household garbage to the pile, day by day the rats got bigger, and that’s where I draw the line in the sand, I’m not going near the rats! After almost a week, we awoke to the joyful humming of the street sweeper, only to find them cleaning around the pile of dumped rubbish, which was eventually removed later in the morning. I hate to think how many employees it took to take those complaints over and over. Tickets were closed, the rubbish was still there. It blocked access for people with mobility issues and it’s now under investigation, but no problem, because it will only take 28 business days to get an answer.
So why are communities so frustrated with their Council? Because their primary responsibility is rates, roads, and rubbish including supporting our elderly, parks and gardens, and libraries etc. Advice to Council: focus on the basics and fix those first. Put confidence back in this community that you can operate efficiently and that someone is responsible for the outcome, it’s called due diligence. Our elderly neighbours with 50 odd years of living in the CoPP have given up asking for help long ago, it’s now over to us. Most other pet projects put forward by Politically aligned Councillors are the responsibility of State and Federal governments, we already pay our taxes for those! Millions of $$$ on a customer service system……and I’m still slipping on the rubber gloves to clean out the street drains on a rainy day!
Solution? Apart from warnings, fines and collecting it ASAP, we desperately need CCTV and better lighting!
Claire, St Kilda Resident
