In her latest column, Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel revisits the ambitious reorganization of the city-parish Department of Public Works—which decentralized under former Mayor Kip Holden—and shares the story about her exhaustive efforts to reach Development Director Cary Chauvin by phone.
“The idea was to take a cumbersome, unwieldy bureaucracy that handles all the stuff in city-parish government people really care about—from traffic, drainage and garbage collection to permitting, code enforcement and grass cutting—and create smaller, more efficient departments that could better respond to the needs of citizens, small businesses and developers,” Riegel writes.
The city hired consultants to map out the reorganization and help implement the transition, she writes. Six new departments—led by “rock star caliber” administrators—were created: maintenance, transportation and drainage, buildings and grounds, environmental services, fleet management, and development.
“Four years and one mayor later, the ‘department formerly known as DPW’ is now six, only slightly less cumbersome, unwieldy bureaucracies,” she says. “Five of the six ‘rock stars’ hired under Holden have left to seek their happiness elsewhere, and most people still don’t know what even to call the various departments that once were DPW.”
But customer service—or the lack thereof—remains one of the most troubling aspects of the reorganizations, she writes. As an example, Riegel explains that earlier this month she needed to talk to someone in code enforcement and decided to call Chauvin’s office.
“He’s director of development, which oversees code enforcement, and knows more about the ‘department formerly known as DPW’ than anyone at City Hall,” she says. “By all accounts he also does a yeoman’s job overseeing an overworked understaffed department. But he’s hard to reach and on this particular day no one answered at his office. I tried three more times. Still, no answer, though I got a recording that said, ‘the mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages.’”
It was an odd message to receive on a city-parish office telephone line, Riegel writes. She dialed the department’s main number and heard a recording that informed her of the department’s hours of operation, which included the time of her call.
The odyssey continued—dialing unanswered numbers, getting busy signals and even reaching a living, breathing person who declined to take a message—until Riegel, in frustration, finally threw in the towel.
“My frustration was but a tiny taste of what developers and builders routinely experience while their projects stall as they wait months for building permits,” she says. “They call Business Report frequently to complain, though they invariably decline to go on the record because they’re afraid of retribution in a city that’s too small for its own good. Pity the poor citizen who calls 311 to complain about a garbage can gone missing or a sink hole in the street. What indignities must they endure? This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.”
Read the full column. Send your comments to editor@businessreport.com.
