My recent experience shows Ottawa City Hall’s whole system for reporting issues or problems — from potholes to construction hazards to broken transit pay terminals — is rotten.
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Have you ever tried to report a hazard to the City of Ottawa through 311 or the My ServiceOttawa website? Or to OC Transpo? Did the experience leave you feeling a little dead inside? Maybe that’s a tax-reducing feature, not evidence of a crisis from decades of austerity at city hall.
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The night I wrote this, I tried emailing OC Transpo to report an ongoing issue with one of its O-Train payment terminals. An automatic response directed me to the “customer feedback” web form, which has a ton of mandatory fields, doesn’t successfully submit the feedback, and doesn’t even have an option to report an issue on the five-year-old Confederation Line (but does have an option to report issues on the not-yet-launched Trillium Line!?). Do I try phoning OC Transpo tomorrow (to report the payment terminal and the broken web form), or not bother?
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Back on Nov. 1 — a Friday afternoon — I phoned 311 to report issues at three separate construction sites where the crews had already left for the day. I hoped that if I called the city, someone would be able to respond and make the sites safe for the weekend.
Four days later — Tuesday — I got a series of calls from a city worker as he drove up and down Albert Street trying to figure out where in LeBreton Flats he might find the construction site I’d reported spewing gravel and dirt into the roadway at one site.
On Nov. 14, I got a call from another city worker who said that my report of construction fencing fallen over at a second site had just landed in his inbox after being redirected twice. He said he also wasn’t the right person, but I appreciate him taking an interest in a problem that was most certainly already dealt with.
I never got a call back about the third site.
Going through the city’s MyServiceOttawa portal isn’t much better. A month after I submitted a report of a hazard on a sidewalk in September, I witnessed someone tripping on that very hazard and falling into the roadway (thankfully escaping uninjured). I wrote to the interim city solicitor threatening to hold the city liable if I or a family member were injured on that hazard. It was fixed within days.
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I mention liability because back in 2008, Ottawa Council under mayor Larry O’Brien rejected a recommendation from its agriculture and rural affairs committee and transportation committee to expand its road patrol program after the auditor general “identified the current road patrol practices as insufficient.”
The expanded program would have brought the city up to the provincial “minimum maintenance standards,” which, the report claims, would offer the city “a certain level of protection to limit liability against claims.” The expansion would have leveraged technology, along with seven additional employees, to proactively identify issues such as potholes and other road hazards.
Council rejected this idea due to O’Brien’s goal of cutting 500 city jobs, and decided to instead rely on residents reporting issues to the city through the 311 call centre and, later, through the City of Ottawa’s website.
This worked for a few years, but my recent experiences demonstrate that the whole system is rotten: even submitting a report with a phone call to 311 (which is the most expensive way for the city to receive reports, and which seems to always be “experiencing high call volumes”) doesn’t get the reported information where it needs to go. Even if it does get to the right department, I bet that repairs land at the bottom of an ever-growing to-do list.
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I wonder if this is a novel liability-reduction strategy at city hall: Make it so futile to report things that nobody reports hazards anymore. If the city doesn’t know about those hazards, it’s not responsible to fix them!
Joking aside, this is the consequence of years of artificially low city budgets. We’re well past the point where the city can find “efficiencies” by cutting staff or not filling open positions, and we’re at the point where the city’s operations are just plain broken and people might actually get hurt.
Charles Akben-Marchand (centretown.blogspot.com) is a pedestrian and cycling advocate who lives in Somerset Ward.
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