Citizen complaint of the day: Wretched refuse continues to plague Greenway park

So perfect your post made the first commenter so mad (at every unknown person who ever walked through the park and noticed the trash spilling out on the ground) that he couldn't contain himself. His writing stylings on the topic are not so very different from professionals like Howie Carr and Michael Graham who assert that people, in the course of living, make trash. The horror.

When the post gets a case ID and then nothing happens for a long time?

After opening dozens of tickets and reading through many public tickets, here's the rundown of CC:

The system is structured with either stunning incompetency or is purposefully designed to make two-way interaction or communication completely impossible. There's no way to respond to a comment, provide further details, or re-open a ticket that shouldn't have been closed. All of which is possible with half a dozen popular open-source helpdesk systems and a number of websites designed for reporting municipal issues that the city could have simply collaborated with.

The system seems structured purposefully to make it difficult to find information on reported issues. You can't search by street or address, neighborhood, type of complaint, date range, or even a simple, basic keyword search like "garbage". There are no public metrics about the number of open/unresolved issues. The system doesn't have any capability to track when issues are reported unsolved but aren't actually solved.

Google used to index the site; at some point someone updated the robots.txt file to disallow all crawlers/robots. URLs to tickets are obfuscated; you can't search by ticket number except via an ancient form that only tells you whether the issue is still open or not.

Staff seem to go out of their way to look for any rhyme or reason to mark a ticket Someone Else's Problem.

The system is entirely dependent on agencies reporting statuses back to the mayor's office. A department and system designed to be a resource for citizens complaining about poor service from the city...relying on the agencies providing poor service to report the status of a complaint. Let's think that one through reaaaaaaaal sloooow. Hmmm, what could possibly go wrong?

Answer: Tickets are repeatedly closed with the work not work done. It took me THREE tickets over the course of WEEKS to get piles of garbage cleaned up on my street; each time the ticket was closed with "done" or "work completed", and each ticket had a photo of the trash, still there, and a comment saying "Why was the previous ticket closed? The trash is still here, see photo." Upon ticket #2, someone should have called up DPW to find out WTF was going on. It was only when I called and chewed out the guy for having to open a THIRD ticket, which was ALSO closed with no work, that a DPW crew came by the next morning and ACTUALLY picked up the trash.

All the time, you see tickets from people angrily complaining that a prior ticket was closed without the work being done. The mayor's office has responded in the past with a shrug saying "well, if the city agency tells us it's been done, we close it out." This happened all last year with unshoveled sidewalk complaints, and the mayor's office had some cute excuse about how there was no way to link with ISD's systems or something, so they just marked all the reports "solved".*

Exactly the kind of pass-the-buck BULLSHIT we shouldn't be getting from an agency whose SOLE PURPOSE IS TO RESOLVE CITIZEN COMPLAINTS. I would also expect lying about work completion to be a problem when CC first came out...but I'd also expect a house-cleaning of lying/lazy city workers who claim work is done when it isn't...but we still have the problem. Why?

Many of the responses to complaints are arrogant, snippity, curt, and outright rude...nowhere near representative of the kind of attitude you should get from an agency designed to be a means of last resort for when the city has failed to get the job done in the first place. A couple of weeks ago someone was clearly having a bad day and was just cutting and pasting the same response to a slew of tickets, in most cases using language that clearly was non sequitor to the type of complaint.

*The mayor's office also claimed last year that ISD was largely powerless to do anything about repeat unshoveled-sidewalk-offenders. Gosh, if only there was a body of elected representatives who could create laws and regulations for the city...OH RIGHT, THE CITY COUNCIL!

The same mayor who wanted to quadruple the red-line fines for cyclists and went to the statehouse to work for it...well, apparently he and the city council just can't seem to figure out how to fix city regulations which leave the city powerless to do anything about unshovelled sidewalks except write another inexpensive ticket. Hey, assholes- instead of lots of drama about the city clerk's job, departed corrupt politicians, celebrity chefs, and so on...how about getting off your asses and passing an ordinance that has teeth? Like fines that start at $100, triple with each violation, and laws that allow the city to place a lien on the property for *any* unpaid inspection-related citations/fines?