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Public Advocacy Project to Begin This Summer
For every successful after school program there will invariably be a congested intersection.
Looking to see which services are excelling and which lagging, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum (D) will conduct a series of “citizen satisfaction surveys” this summer, using flash polls and focus groups to find out how people rate the government at doing its job.
Based on the results of the surveys, a select group of community leaders will assist Gotbaum and others in prioritizing which services are in need of the most improvement. Participants will include tenant and block association members, business and religious leaders and others.
The results will then go to Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R), who Gotbaum hopes will use them to enact policy changes.
“Who is a better judge of how the city government performs than the people that receive those services?” said Gotbaum.
The Public Advocacy Project, as it is known, is Gotbaum’s attempt to extend the influence of her office beyond fielding transferred 311 calls.
New Yorkers will able to point out the problems in the delivery of government services, said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College. And based on the data, lawmakers will be able to make the appropriate policy decisions, he said.
The scope of the surveys will be broad, with a total of 3,500 residents from all five boroughs slated to participate. Muzzio and others at Baruch’s Survey Research Unit will be in charge of the scientific nuts and bolts of the surveys.
This spring, the CouncilStat database will come online, modeled after the popular New York Police Department (NYPD) database, CompStat.
“CouncilStat will let us see when one constituent call is more than an isolated problem—when it’s actually part of a larger trend that requires a legislative, budget or policy response,” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) during her State of the City speech in February.
The plan is to test the database in one office in each of the five boroughs. Eventually, all 51 Council offices will be integrated into the system, allowing members to determine whether constituent complaints are isolated events or part of citywide problems.
Though there are no final figures for how much the program will cost, money was included in last year’s budget to fund CouncilStat. The five district offices where CouncilStat will be tested have not been finalized, according to Quinn’s office.
The Council took a cue from the NYPD in designing the database. CompStat, the police department’s computerized database for crime statistics, was introduced by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1990s. Many say that the integrated information has eased police action, and contributed to the decline in the crime rate, though some argue that the NYPD has used the system to obscure data in order to massage statistics.
—Andrew Hawkins
The project is rooted in “Giving Taxpayers More Bang for Their Buck,” a report released over the summer by the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC). The 14-month-long study concluded that taxpayers were not engaged enough in the city’s $54 billion enterprise.
The commission recommended conducting citizen surveys to help officials ascertain how well the city is performing, said Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the CBC. Diana Fortuna, president of the CBC, will sit on the board of advisors.
In a preliminary step, the public advocate’s office invited over 60 community leaders in November 2006 to Baruch to vote on the importance and quality of more than 100 city services.
The top five issues—according to how many people thought the issue was “extremely important” and “poor” in management by the city—were affordable housing, traffic congestion, high school dropout prevention, after school programs and access to city agencies.
Eighty-two percent of the meeting participants thought that affordable housing was extremely important, and 60 percent believed the city was doing a poor job providing it. Around half of the participants said the city was doing just a fair job of keeping schools safe, which 90 percent said should be a top priority.
Taking these surveys and translating them into the larger Public Advocacy Project is anticipated to cost around $510,000 over two years.
Gotbaum, whom Muzzio and others referred to as an “excellent fundraiser,” is raising the money through the Fund for Public Advocacy, a registered not-for-profit she helped create.
So far, the New York Community Trust has donated $100,000. Several other organizations and foundations are in talks.
No public money is expected to be used.
Elected officials, survey experts and political observers say that they are eager to see the results of the surveys, but that the devil is in the details.
“This project is interesting because it appears to be designed differently than other citizen surveys,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan). “With people from various civic groups advising them, it seems specifically designed to get at the root of these issues.”
Brewer served several years as deputy public advocate for intergovernmental affairs under Mark Green (D) and is thought by some to be mulling a bid for the office herself in 2009, though she denies it.
And there may be other problems as well.
Surveys are inexact when looking at more complex matters, said Barbara Cohn Berman, vice president of the Fund for the City of New York, which provides millions of dollars to non-profit and government projects annually.
Others were more critical of Gotbaum’s intent.
“It sounds like they’re using 20th Century technology rather than 21st Century technology to bring this thing together,” said Andrew Rasiej, an internet entrepreneur and a candidate for public advocate in 2005. “I don’t understand why they can’t use the Internet to engage people.”
But despite all the potential pitfalls, Gotbaum is sure the project and its results will grab Bloomberg’s attention.
“It won’t get lost on the mayor’s desk because in the end it’ll make everyone look good,” she said. “It’s not about standing on the steps of City Hall and saying, ‘Gotcha!’ It’s about saying, ‘Let’s take the time to fix this process.’”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) has a new idea for 311: integrating camera phone technology.
The administration has grand promises for the idea: people who send in pictures of potholes snapped on their phones could see repair crews by the next day.
According to John Feinblatt, Bloomberg’s criminal justice coordinator, the effort to integrate camera phones with 311 is being developed in tandem with a similar upgrade to 911.
The mayor hopes to roll out the project soon given that the technology it will rely on already exists, according to Feinblatt.
“The trick will be integrating the new features into our existing 311 and 911 computer systems,” he said.
The mayor’s office, however, does not plan on collaborating with Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum (D), who is technically charged with being the ombudswoman for city services.
“What difference does it make if we get a picture of a pothole sent to 311?” said Gotbaum’s chief of staff, Anat Jacobson. “I can see how it would be useful for the NYPD, but not 311.”
The mayor’s 2007 budget proposal does not include cash for the 311 upgrade. Feinblatt would not comment on how much the project would cost beyond saying the upgrade would require a “new investment” in the city’s information technology infrastructure.
—Andrew Hawkins