For almost as long as City Hall has been on Perdido Street, New Orleans residents have considered it a place where efficiency and enthusiasm go to die. Customer service, put simply, has often been considered abysmal. To repair a house or start a business, a typical resident would have to navigate numerous commissions and departments, riding the elevators between...
For almost as long as City Hall has been on Perdido Street, New Orleans residents have considered it a place where efficiency and enthusiasm go to die. Customer service, put simply, has often been considered abysmal.
To repair a house or start a business, a typical resident would have to navigate numerous commissions and departments, riding the elevators between floors or even going to other buildings to collect one permit after another, often over many visits. Sometimes, just getting a call directed to the right department seemed like an impossible task.
It was a morass Mayor Mitch Landrieu inherited when he took office in May 2010, and a problem he promised to address, despite a skeptical citizenry.
Now, almost three years later, most contractors, consultants and lawyers seem to agree: customer service at City Hall has improved greatly since the days of former Mayor Ray Nagin, when confusion and indifference seemed to run through the government's rank-and-file.
"Huge trust issues remain, and while they are hopeful the new mayor will improve things, most residents expect that when they deal with city government, it will be frustrating at best," the consulting firm Public Strategies Group wrote after being asked to advise Landrieu about the problems. "No one is accountable for the quality of service to customers."
Since he took office, Landrieu has tried to dismantle City Hall's roadblocks to efficiency, a process that has run into both successes and setbacks. His efforts reached a milestone this week when his administration unveiled the "one-stop shop," a seventh-floor central service station meant to process many of the permits, licenses and other red-tape items that residents and businesses need to live and operate in New Orleans.
"To be clear, we have a long way to go to where we want to get," Landrieu's Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin said, "but we're a long way from where we were."
Landrieu took over a City Hall languishing under an ineffective bureaucracy further crippled by the city's halting recovery from Hurricane Katrina. City workers were disgruntled, several contractors and residents recalled. Work slowed to a halt and the length of a City Hall workday appeared to shrink. Get there right before or right after lunch, some said, or otherwise you might find no one to help you.
To cut costs, Nagin in 2010 closed City Hall on Fridays, which Kopplin said, only saved money on electricity bills - less than $1 million.
Shortly after his election, Landrieu made improving customer service a top priority. He tapped hoteliers Michael Valentino and Angela Thompson to lead a task force to highlight the most egregious customer service problems. And he appointed former state Sen. Ann Duplessis as a deputy chief administrative officer with the assignment of improving the government's interactions with its constituents. To do that, the new administration said, it needed to shift a firmly entrenched attitude of apathy.
"A lot of the operations seemed more geared toward what was helpful for the city than what was important for our customers," Kopplin said. "I think a lot of managers did not appreciate that good customer service was in fact part of everyone's job description as to how they do their work."
Landrieu returned to a five-day workweek but then found that to save money he had to institute unpaid employee furloughs for the second half of 2010, dealing employee morale a blow. The administration is now fending off further furloughs by not filling open positions as city workers retire, Kopplin said, adding that the administration has spent $40 million less over three years than Nagin's team was spending on payroll in 2009.
Still, the task force, coupled with the Public Strategies Group report in 2011, spawned major changes that are just now being put into place. The most visible examples are the city's 311 hotline, launched last year, and this week's christening of the one-stop shop for licenses and permits.
During his tenure, Nagin had outsourced the city's 311 service, which was eventually suspended after failing during Hurricane Gustav in 2008. Bent on resurrecting a functional version of the service, Landrieu's task force visited several cities, settling on something similar to what Boston had.
After several setbacks from lack of funding, Landrieu launched the newly redesigned 311 call center in September. The center has eight full-time operators, two part-timers and two managers to field public complaints and information requests for 31 city departments. Plans are in the works to expand its reach, although the administration hasn't released specifics.
The 311 service is separate from the city's help desk, which fields information and technology questions from city employees, which directly affects employees' ability to do their jobs.
As part of a pledge to measure its progress toward stated goals, the administration tracked that 16 percent of calls to the help desk from October through December never reached an operator, apparently because the callers got tired of being on hold and hung up. That was far from the 5 percent hang-up rate the administration was striving for, Kopplin said, adding that he believes the rate can be improved as the city gets better at coordinating more operators during busier times of the day or the year.
Complementing the 311 service is the city's redesigned website, which has evolved in fits and starts over several years. Landrieu did away with the gloomy "cityofno.com" name in favor of "nola.gov," and his administration has gradually rolled out new features to let residents and businesses interact with City Hall and to track information. In October, for example, the city launched a portal to report and track the remediation of blighted properties.
Possibly the greatest accomplishment so far is the implementation of the one-stop shop, a pipe dream that has circulated through past administrations as far back as the 1980s. Landrieu's administration made the transition this week, but not without its own set of problems. It was initially set to launch in January 2012 and later in October, but a lack of money and logistical problems -- Dep. Mayor Michelle Thomas spent months trying to find a space to house all the agencies involved -- kept pushing it back.
On Thursday, Landrieu announced that the City Planning Commission, Historic District Landmarks Commission, Safety and Permits Department and Vieux Carre Commission had moved into the same set of offices in City Hall.
Likewise, the tracking of who has applied for which permits - a feature that disappeared from the city website shortly after Landrieu took office - was reinstated last week, spokesman Ryan Berni said.
Berni added that the administration has plans to streamline permit and license applications online, with an eye toward eventually sparing applicants a trip to City Hall. Residents and contractors can now pay permit fees with credit cards, too, he said, 13 years after the online paysite PayPal was founded.
"It's a major step toward modernizing business operations," he said.
Fully fixing City Hall's customer service problem is far from over. For one thing, Kopplin said, the administration is considering what to do with Duplessis, who has applied to become executive director of the French Market Corp. In addition to her role in City Hall, she currently is running that agency on an interim basis.
Valentino, who led Landrieu's customer service task force, said he wants to see better training for employees who must interact regularly with the public, as well as improved efficiency by 311 operators in directing callers to the proper departments.
"I'm not nearly suggesting that we're where we would like to be, but we're moving in the right direction," he said.
Peter Title, a real estate lawyer, recalled a client who recently wanted to start a business in the French Quarter. After applying for an occupational license, he said, his client discovered the Vieux Carre Commission had failed to sign off on another permit he needed, almost throwing the whole enterprise off track. It took Title a flurry of phone calls and his knowledge of the right people to steer through the red tape.
Title echoed Valentino's careful praise, adding that better technology and better communication among city departments will improve customer service all the more.
"Paper is just hard to shuffle back and forth to departments," he said. "Things get lost."
Some frequent visitors to City Hall have found the improvements unprecedented. Skip Gallagher, a former president of the Algiers Point Association, said he recently walked in at 5 p.m. and an employee willingly reopened a just-shut office to help him out.
"It's absolutely remarkable. You have the employees now who are there," he said. "They used to be invisible. You used to go in there and not find anyone."
Gallagher's tenure as a neighborhood association president spanned both the Nagin and Landrieu administrations. Under Nagin, Gallagher said, he could always reach the mayor and find a sympathetic ear, but nothing ever came of his complaints. Now, he can't get Landrieu on the phone to save his life, but every time he brings something to someone in City Hall, it gets taken care of.
"I'm extraordinarily happy," Gallagher said. "The downside, by far, is small in comparison with the upside."
