City needs new service strategy

Tim Geddes

One of the biggest complaints I heard from citizens during the

recent campaign for City Council was that City Hall was unresponsive

to the needs of average community members. Several candidates

promised to listen to the concerns of citizens without a clear

mechanism for addressing them beyond their own personal involvement.

Apparently, talking with an impersonal voice on the phone or behind a

counter didn’t sit well with residents, either.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a communication

breakdown exists in our city, and it is something that our new City

Council must fix before trying to tackle the city’s other pressing

problems.

Our new leaders must be open to new ideas and innovative

strategies that will deal with what has not been dealt with before.

More of the same standard operating procedure won’t do, no matter who

sits on the dais.

What Huntington Beach needs is a new approach to serving the needs

of our taxpayers and residents. Taking a page from the system

developed in Scandinavian countries, I propose we establish a city

ombudsman service.

Ombudsmen were originally government officials charged with

investigating citizens’ complaints of maladministration by government

departments or functionaries. This function expanded to investigating

complaints, reporting findings and assisting in achieving fair

settlements or results. They were kind of like consumer advocates for

the citizenry. Ombudsmen helped ordinary citizens “access the system”

and made it responsive to the needs of the community.

A small group of full-time city ombudsmen could dramatically

affect the levels of service and representation in our city by acting

as “middle men” between city staff and local government on one side

and community or small business interests on the other side.

This new service could be implemented without being a budget

buster if the incoming City Council chooses to adopt new personnel

policies that eliminate some positions and add others. The so-called

“hiring freeze” should be scrapped in favor of adding and subtracting

positions to provide better communication and service with the

public.

However, it must take firm and decisive action by the new City

Council to establish this as a priority and to fight for it through

the process. Citizens who feel that having civic advocates empowered

to “access the system” (even if the net result is better information

and understanding) on their behalf is desirable should add their

voices to this call for action.

In order to truly address the complaints we heard about

representation during the campaign, we need more than the

ministrations of part-time politicians who are sympathetic to

community needs. We need to improve the present system. We need a

local government that is less preoccupied with organizational

effectiveness and more concerned about service effectiveness.

* TIM GEDDES is a Huntington Beach resident. To contribute to

“Sounding Off” e-mail us at hbindy@latimes.com or fax us at (714)

965-7174.