09-17-18 Personnel and Finance (#9)

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CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK the same week.Again,there are challenges but we are working to address them. Lastly,we ran the survey for City services that we shared with the Council a couple of weeks ago. We asked about 311 and, by and large,the majority of people seem satisfied with 311 and also with the outcomes. We benchmark against both the region and nationally and, in all of the questions we asked about how polite, accurate and timely we were, we were rated higher than the average. But, there are issues. One (1) of the issues we want to acknowledge is streetlights. The challenge is that eighty percent (80%) of the streetlights are owned by AEP. AEP is responsible for those lights and they have a system to report them. So when people call 311, we usually tell them to contact AEP but we also take the information from the resident about the pole and we pass that information along to Engineering and Streets. Engineering and Streets, with some frequency, meet with AEP and then they share those issues. There are opportunities for improvement and just to share with you here, you have a map (referencing a slide in the presentation) and in purple you have all the locations of the AEP-owned lights. In green are the City-owned lights. The map to the right is the location of all active tickets. Tickets are active until the department closes them. One (1) of the issues we face is because it goes out of our hands and goes into AEP's hands, we aren't closing the tickets. There is a gap between what AEP is doing and then what we are doing. That is something we know we need to do better but at least you can see all of the investments and they are all leading us to identifying these issues and addressing them. Committee Chair White then opened the floor to questions and comments from Committee and Council Members. Committeemember Voorde stated, I thought it was kind of a simple question because one (1) of the few times I've called 311 was just recently when a resident told me they had four(4)streetlights out in a two (2) block area. I called 311 and they were very nice. They took the information and I said I don't have addresses but the poles are marked with a little blue plastic ribbon so they would be easy to find. I wondered what happened with that call and I think you just told me. Mr. Garces replied, Yeah and, again, in the future when we open up some of the information we have online, you should be able to see the status of your service request and be able to track that real-time. Right now if you wanted to follow up, you could call 311 and they would tell you what the status is. Committeemember Voorde followed up, Is AEP responsive enough? Mr. Garces replied, That would be hard for me to answer because Engineering and Streets are the ones that deal with them the most. I think there are some ideas to improve on that relationship. Cynthia Simmons-Taylor, Director of 311 with offices located at 125 S. Lafayette Boulevard, stated, We changed our process about two (2) weeks ago to help cut down on the processing time of the AEP-owned lights. Thank you, President Scott. You were the one (1) that helped us understand how the process was going. When we would submit it to the Streets Department and Traffic and Lighting, it would go on a spreadsheet and when they would submit it to AEP, AEP would work on them whenever they got time. We have been putting it in the system ourselves. If someone calls now, we request the Street Department to do it but until such a time, 311 is directly reporting it to AEP. We are then taking the request number and putting it in CRM. When the caller calls us back, we give them that number so that they can track it themselves. EXCELLENCE I ACCOUNTABILITY I INNOVATION I INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building(227 W.Jefferson Bvld I South Bend,Indiana 466011 p 574.235.92211f 574.235.9173 I TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 16