The city auditor’s office just put out its annual ombudsman report. It’s nothing juicy—that sort of thing usually is saved for audits. But it does round up a few cases when the auditor’s office was able to help regular Johnny and Jane Lunchpails like yourself extract some answers from the city’s sprawling, often faceless bureaucracy, on things like sinkholes, a neighbor’s tall grass, and city workers sloughing off on the job.
What I found most interesting comes near the bottom of the report. It’s a chart showing which bureaus received the most complaints in 2010. Topping the list? Randy Leonard’s old domain, the bureau of development services. Given the bureau’s mission—conducting code and safety inspections, and issuing permits and fines—that’s actually not that surprising. Though I might have thought, what with all the pothole bitching on the mayor’s Twitter feed, that the second-place bureau of transportation would have won out.
Other beefed-about bureaus: environmental services and water, the people who bring your apartment/house water and then whisk away your slime and waste.
Let’s jazz things up a bit and rename the OMF as the Office of Management, Finance and Growth (OMFG).
Does the PDC fall under “planning/sustainability”? Because frankly, they’re at the tippy-top of my shitlist.
And I’m saying that as a homeowner who did the plans for her own addition. Let’s just say that getting the permits from BDS was a similar exchange to getting beads at Mardi Gras. (not really) (okay, maybe)
I just found out that you should always get a letter from BDS when they tell you “that you don’t need a permit for that.”
The number of complaints generally correlate to the amount of interaction with the public the bureaus have.
Generally, anything with high public interest will draw lots of complaints.
But there looks to be a sampling problem. Police bureau has to be more interesting to people than the Cable regulators. Do the police complaints not go through the same channels as other bureaus?