By Max Linsky
Dead fish.
They've washed up on your front lawn after an evening rainstorm. You don't want them there, but you don't want to pick them up either. So what do you do when the odor pouring out of those decaying mullet has found its way into your living room?
If you're living in St. Petersburg, there's no need to slap a clothespin on your snout. Take off your industrial-strength gloves, sit down at the computer and tell the city to do it.
Action Online, the online complaint service that went live in December 2001, brought the telephone based Mayor's Action Center into the 21st century. While the office still receives far more requests (like dead fish removal) via phone, Action Online has the ability to make bureaucratic government more accessible—and more accountable.
Under the guidance of Mayor Rick Baker, the city has attempted to revolutionize how residents and tourists interact with government by streamlining information and putting it online. Log onto www.stpete.org and you can nominate your neighbor for citizen of the month, look for a job and pay a parking ticket, all with just a few clicks.
You can also file a complaint from that page. The website asks you to fit your request, which you can make anonymously, into one of 50 categories. Action Online isn't made for emergency situations, but inconveniences that only neighborhood residents would notice. Aside from dead fish removal (there have been 10 complaints since January 2002), you can alert the city to a newfound piece of graffiti, the soft sand in the alley or a stopped-up catch basin.
Complaints lodged in some categories, such as code violations, are automatically siphoned to the appropriate department. For everything else, there is Ellen McDowell. The wizard of Action Online, McDowell handles 75 percent of the website's traffic, sending requests to the right office and answering any random question she can. McDowell, who gives her age as "ageless," has worked in the mayor's office for the past 12 years. She has bounced around between a slew of different jobs, but she's finally found a home: in front of the computer, managing the site. Driving directions, cockroach extermination procedures, restaurant recommendations—McDowell handles it all for the 2-year-old program.
Action Online may be relatively young, but residents have been able to make official complaints directly to the city since 1982. There is little difference between phone and e-mail requests initially. With either method, residents' queries are routed to the appropriate department or answered directly if possible. It is what happens after a complaint is made that makes the difference for both residents and city officials.
Before Action Online, complaints simply couldn't be tracked. If your neighbor had parked a car on the front lawn, you could call city hall and ask officials to deal with it, which 358 residents did online last year. Then you were left to hope that, at some point, city workers would come by and have your neighbor move the car. While citizens were given a contact name and number to check up on their request, there was no paperwork on their complaint until the job was completed. That left department heads and government contacts ill-equipped to give updates on any case, let alone all of them.
Now, with the digital filing cabinet available online, City Hall gives requests a number and an easily accessible electronic file. Simply by typing in the file number, citizens and government officials alike can check up on a case. Unlike phone inquiries, which are often lost in the dark depths of interdepartmental communication, online request files are updated whenever action is taken on them, no matter how small.
So when a public service representative is sent out to check up on your neighbor's Chevy, you can find out what they saw, what they're going to do and when they're going to come back.
The ability to track complaints helps administrators as well. With the phone system, complaints disappeared once they had been addressed. As Deputy Mayor Michael Dove points out, the parks commissioner can now go back and look at every complaint lodged about Mirror Lake, and notice trends that need addressing. "It lets us do our job better," he says.
The service, McDowell says, is also about convenience. Before complaints could be lodged online, citizens could only get in touch with City Hall during normal business hours. If you couldn't get away from work, you couldn't make a complaint.
Now, if they go online, citizens can make a request whenever it's convenient for them. According to McDowell, many of the e-mails she receives are logged after 2 a.m. And while McDowell is home and asleep when the requests come in, waiting complaints are her first order of business in the morning, she says.
Action Online can be so convenient that sometimes McDowell has to step out from behind her computer screen. Two years ago a couple from Ohio planning a vacation to St. Petersburg went to Action Online to ask how they could obtain a marriage license in Florida.
McDowell wrote them back saying that all they would need was the signature of a notary public. The couple, in turn, asked where they could find one, not knowing that McDowell was a notary public herself.
Then McDowell leapt far beyond the confines of her job description, or Action Online's, and wrote that she would marry the couple herself, which she did six months later.
The wizard of Action Online doesn't often come out from behind her computer screen -- she spends her time managing her own domain. But if it's a dead fish you need dealt with, Ellen McDowell will be happy to send someone else out to take it away.