I know I have written about the subject of constituent services in the past, but since the thread showed up again, I will recap some of those previous thoughts.
I definitely favor an "Office of Constituent (or Customer) Services" instead of the haphazard, random way of doing business we currently have. Council Members do like to know - and they should - what it going on in their wards, but these phone calls provide episodic glimpses of what is really going on. An office to respond to these kind of information or complaint calls would then be able to route the call to the appropriate person or department, catalogue it as to its nature, provide daily, weekly, monthly summaries of the calls, analyze for trends, develop a follow-up system and more. What this would do would be to free up the Council Members to focus on policy. Now I know that some will not like this, but, hey, that's the job. I also favor moving some staff from the Council Members to this office. With Council Members getting more and more computer literate all the time, many do their own schedules and correspondence. I don't believe each Council Member needs a secretary and an aide (by the way, between the two salaries - that is between $70,000 and $100,000 before benefits). We can and should do better with resources. Just because it hasn't been tried before doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Jan Del Calzo Lynnhurst _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
