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A plea for voicemail at City Hall - and an offer of a discount at Victoria's Secret
By adamg on Sat, 10/10/2009 - 12:14am
The city quietly posted a new batch of e-mail messages to Michael Kineavy Friday evening. Among the messages, a February, 2009 plea from Bryan Glasscock, director of the city environment department, for help in convincing Mayor Tom Menino to reconsider his decision to yank out all of City Hall's voice-mail systems:
... Every day we get calls asking to leave voicemail because the caller has a detailed message that does not lend itself to transcription by the receptionist. They are angry and frustrated when they're told we don't have VM and they often ask how, in this age of technology, we still don't have it. So they end up leaving a name and number, later we return the call and end up leaving THEM a VM, they call back here and leave a name and number, but they can't tell us why they're calling, what question they might have, etc. With VM they could leave a detailed message such as "I still don't have the drawings for the West Newton St. project, can I still get on the March agenda and get you the plans early next week." Then the South End Planner could call them back and leave a VM that says, "Why yes, of course, that would be fine," thereby saving a frustrating game of phone tag and resolving the question quickly and accurately. ...
Among the more common messages in the files are request for help getting a relative a job. In December, 2008, one woman tried an unusual tact to get a relative a job: Offering free admission to the Bank of America Pavillion, where she worked and:
I also work part time at Victoria's Secret, so anything you would want there I can get for 30% off, except the underwear, but everything else I can get.
There is no indication Kineavy took the woman up on her offers - but the e-mail copies are only of messages to Kineavy, not from him.
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Comments
Sounds like 1993 to me
At City Hall parties, does the Menino Machine party like it's 1993? What is going on here? No voicemail - no 311 call center - no performance-based management. As John McEnroe would say: "You cannot be serious."
How can we even imagine four more years from this spent administration? Vote for Flaherty & Yoon on November 3rd.
Jobs for the boys...
These guys are a disgrace. Let's get rid of them on November 3rd.
compare Cory Booker to Menino
we're so used to the way we do things here...
check out the difference in attitude...
http://entrylevelliving.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/l...
funny, Cory Booker praised Menino on a tweet recently
After sad Sam tried to involve Booker, he himself tweeted that he had learned a lot from the Mayor's initiatives in Boston!
BTW - the author of the comment was "let go" from his job, think he has an axe to grind?
You call me out as "let go" but won't ID yourself. SMH
First of all, I resigned. Neil Sullivan offered me a place/"role" and I said no thanks. They paid me a nice buyout too. Hardly a firing. In hindsight maybe it would have been personally better for me to remain somewhere in the admin - its hard to dislodge folks once they're in.
That said, for better or worse in terms of managerial ability, I was the Project Director of a $6 million grant that got the city a follow-on $24 million grant. Within a year only 2 of my staff were left. No one was fired but we were all made to feel uncomfortable.
The new leadership of what was an out-of-school youth grant proceeded to do things like go to English H.S. and enroll seniors but post-date their apps until the summer. Hardly the dropouts the grant was supposed to serve. Silly us, we thought the grant was about saving lives in Southie (suicide/heroin) and helping the kids in Orchard Park who said no to violence and crime.
So yeah, I do have an AXE TO GRIND! DUH! No different than West Enders having an "axe to grind" against the BRA. For GOOD reason.
I put my name in my original comments and clearly ID'd myself just by my first name, since you obviously have figured me out. I've got nothing to hide. But you hide behind "anon" and throw darts. Don't push me on this, I know who the staff are after my time who were getting high while browbeating the teens about "shaping up". And many other examples.
I was not a perfect manager by any means. It was a setup and I walked right into it. But we tried our best. Unlike some other ppl.
And PS, I was talking to the Mayor, Kineavy and Larry Mayes in 2007 about running a new outreach program. Hmm... doesn't sound like they felt it was a firing. That program was then iced at the time b/c the Mayor got cranky and barked he "didn't want to hear anything more about street workers."
there is voicemail - after 5, and a 24 hour service
which was started long before the "311" craze.
Interestingly, Baltimore seems to have stopped posting their "311" reporting system.
"PC2" emails by Kineavy
Yes, those two jumped out... I love the earnestness of the Environment Dept. chief as he tries to appeal to logic and sneak this one by.
Let me shed some light on the voice mail thing. Yes, Menino & the city are behind the times in technology (when I was at BCC - now BCYF - in 1996, we got our FIRST PC's! I had been using PC's & Macs for more than 10 years prior!) However, Menino's objection to voice mail speaks more to his crabbiness than him being a luddite...
When I was at Jobs & Community Services (1997-2000), it was explained that while we did have voice mail, we better not let calls bounce around without a human answering, nor should we let a v.m. languish in our box for days without a response. You see, we were told, the Mayor might call up one day and if he can't find a human being, POOF, your voice mail is revoked. End of story - no arguing with him.
Check out p57
Check out the thread that runs from p57 to p58. Looks like someone is working full-time as a probation officer and also has a no-show full-time job as director of the Murphy Community Center in Dorchester.
Flame war p68
Flame war between Transportation Commissioner Thomas Tinlin and Kineavy's girlfriend Eileen Fenton at the Mass Pike. "They should pay us to use their stupid tunnels" says Tinlin, perhaps not realizing that he had just clicked "Reply All" instead of "Reply."
Looks like the Globe also noticed that one.
Fun stuff!
"Messages Exempt Due to Privilege"
The Globe should probe the "Messages Exempt Due to Privilege"
I understand the need and the right to redact in entirety correspondence about personnel matters but not internal rules and procedures. Those are a matter of public record and should be withheld.
They have also redacted (in entirety) e-mail citing attorney-client privilege. Let's be clear, the client is the Menino administration not any given employee. What right does the city have to assert the privilege to conceal communications about legal opinion and council recorded in public records? Who has the authority to assert that privilege and under what constraints?
Attorney-client privilege
Use of the attorney-client privilege as a basis for exempting some documents from disclosure in connection with the public records law was recently affirmed by the SJC in a case brought by Suffolk Construction against the Division of Capital Asset Management (of the Commonwealth).
The client issue is a tricky one. The City of Boston, as a municipal entity, is the client for its corporation counsel. Not the "Menino Administration". However, in reality, it might help to think of an analogous situation in a corporation. The corporation is the client. Not the CEO, not any individual board members. However, as you might have guessed, the chief counsel, who often reports to the CEO (but shouldn't in my opinion - she should report directly to the board or the chair of the board), can very easily find herself in a position where the CEO is directing her to do something that might not be in the best interests of the corporation. The easy answer is "well, stand up and refuse citing your professional responsibility to the actual client". Well, I can tell you that plenty of lawyers have done so and been quickly dismissed, which is a tough situation to be in when firms around the city are shedding large amounts of lawyers for the first time in living memory. Welcome to the world of in-house counsel.
I think that the attorney client privilege in this realm attaches when the corporation counsel (or his subordinate lawyers) are rendering legal advice to employees of the City (or employees are writing/conversing with counsel and seeking legal advice) who are acting in their official capacities as employees of the city. The scope of the privilege in this environment is pretty broad - perhaps even more so than I have described it here.
An interesting legal issue here is that the attorney-client privilege is not one of the statutory exemptions to the public records law (it is a centuries old common law privilege, which is how the SJC properly characterized it in the case). Consequently, I do not believe the Secretary of State nor the Attorney General could compel disclosure of those records, at least not under the public records law, without a court order. The only way it will come out is if the client, who owns the privilege, waives it. Don't hold your breath on that one.
Example
You live in Boston. You sue the city for some reason. The employees then e-mail back and forth with the lawyer defending the city against your lawsuit to discuss the specifics and how they will defend against your claims. You then use the Public Records Law to see those e-mails. Uh...yeah...that seems fair.
Nice
Wait, I thought it said "Come into Victoria's Secret, my underwear is 30% off."
hey
no stealing my sn
Correction on vague statement
Original post wrote:
Not exactly correct. Yes, regarding Victoria's Secret, there are no emails. But occasionally in the entire collection of emails you do see one or two from Kineavy himself.
It is much more common, however, to read Kineavy writing "call me"... and hence no further paper or email trail.