: Building Trust: Agency Cleans Up Complaints, Web Site Is Next

Councilman Eric Gioia (D-Sunnyside) and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller held a press conference on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon last month and said the Department of Buildings failed the people of Queens. As it turns out, they were right, and they were wrong.

The two were releasing a report that claimed the backlog in open complaints at the DOB was skyrocketing out of control. That conclusion was partially based on information gleaned from a Web site that the DOB maintained. Ultimately, that information turned out to be incorrect.

DOB officials later admitted to accidentally posting faulty information on the Internet, which gave a negative impression of their own performance. Now they are faced with the job of clearing their own name and making sure the public can still trust them in the process.

In The Spotlight
The problem came to light after City Council Committee on Oversight and Investigations issued a report that used in inaccurate statistics to confirm other sources indicating that Queens had an extraordinarily large backlog of complaints compared to other boroughs.

The statistics, taken from an internal committee called BUILD, were taken from a two-page online summary of performance indicators posted on the DOB Web site. A Tribune investigation discovered that since July 2004 the BUILD site had misreported the number of complaints the department received from city residents. The mistake came when a staff member transferred the wrong column of numbers from a monthly internal report to the computer screen. Correct numbers have since been placed on the Web site.

Using the mistaken numbers, the report missed a marked reduction in the number of open complaints that occurred between November 2004 and May 2005. Instead of skyrocketing from 11,000 to 15,000 open complaints, as the report suggested, that statistic steadily dropped every month, reaching as low as 2,452, according to numbers the DOB provided upon request.

Gioia, who chairs the investigations committee, stood by the report, saying it still identified several areas where the DOB could do better. Still, he was encouraged that the DOB took this opportunity to make sure their public information was accurate and transparent.

“Identifying problems and recognizing that we can do better is an important first step towards improving performance,” Gioia said. ”The public deserves a buildings department that rapidly examines complaints and accurately reports its proceedings.”

Finding A Solution
Spurred by the discovery of the mistake, the Department of Buildings plans to audit its Web site to ensure all the statistics posted there accurately reflect the internal numbers viewed by agency employees, DOB officials said Wednesday.
DOB analysts will check information on the site against their own records and data entry system, and confirm that the public records match those within the department, according to Jennifer Givner, spokeswoman for the DOB. The department is also looking into hiring new analysts to help sort through the mass of information the DOB must compile every month, Givner said.

One recently acquired analyst has been developing a project plan to better maintain public records, Givner said, and, although not yet set in stone, also institute a quality control computer program that would directly translate information from the DOB database onto the Web.
“A lot of the problem was that with so much data, and pulling from so many different sources, it was sometimes difficult to keep track,” Givner said. “By creating standard operating procedures, we’ve tried to eliminated all the manual transposition of data and pull it directly from our internal sources.”

The Improvement
In the fall of last year, DOB officials recognized there was a growing problem in Queens. Community groups began to call attention to the fact that there were more than 10,000 open complaints in the borough, and the numbers did not seem to be shrinking. It was time for action.

The DOB managed to reduce its backlog successfully by reassigning seven inspectors from other boroughs to Queens between December and June. To permanently address the growing number of complaints in Queens, the DOB will soon promote three inspectors to become supervisors and add six new inspectors to the borough office.

After working through some red tape, the new inspectors should begin within one or two months, at which point it takes about six weeks to become fully trained, said Diana Mack-Henry, the Queens inspection manager. In the meantime, existing inspectors are working several hours of overtime each week to prevent the backlog from amassing.

Mack-Henry, who started in March, fills a newly created position that has been instituted in all the boroughs. DOB officials said they were confident in her performance thus far, having already reorganized inspection routes to make them more efficient.

“We’ve been able to do a really good job in that sense, functioning to stop the bottleneck and figure out how we can fix these problems,” Mack-Henry said. “A far as the borough going forward, we are definitely heading in the right direction.”

A New Problem?
But despite the best efforts of the DOB, since the additional inspectors left in June, the number of open complaints has risen almost 1,000, to 3,300, according to DOB statistics. The spike reflects a large rush of complaints that come during the building season, running from March to September, and a drop in inspectors due to summer vacations, Mack-Henry said.

Some in the community are concerned, however, that the DOB have solved the backlog problem in the short term only to let it build back up again. Bob Holden, director of the Juniper Valley Civic Association, said the DOB should hire even more inspectors than they have planned.

“They were gaining control, but they’re getting behind again,” Holden said.

Gioia, through the Freedom of Information Act, has also asked for the DOB to submit a record of its performance to keep a tighter watch on the agency. He is also considering holding hearings on the DOB’s ability to accurately report their internal information to the public.

Mack-Henry was confident the new inspectors would be enough to handle the workload in Queens. The backlog will likely not grow at the pace it once did, she said, because the department will be more cautious about keeping it low.
“Right now we are on the right track as far as getting what we need in budget our resources,” Mack-Henry said. “We will get the number where they should be.”