Worcester mulls online complaint system

An effort has been under way for more than a decade in Worcester to measure the effectiveness of city government. One element of the “benchmarking” program involves volunteers who use handheld computers and digital cameras to document conditions in their neighborhoods.

The program, known as ComNET (short for Computerized Neighborhood Environment Tracking), is run by the Worcester Regional Research Bureau, not by the city itself. And for now, its primary purpose is to furnish data for Research Bureau reports that gauge the rate at which the city responds to problems ranging from litter and faded crosswalks to defective fire hydrants, abandoned cars and dilapidated buildings. But the city is looking to eventually take over the program and adapt it to its own use.

Jill Dagilis, Worcester’s director of code enforcement, says the goal is to create an online system through which citizens can log complaints or concerns. The city, in turn, would log its activity so that citizens could monitor the status of their complaints online. Such a system, Dagilis says, is perhaps a year or two away.

In the program’s current form, which dates back to 2001, volunteers assisted by students from Holy Cross College use drop-down menus on their handheld devices to denote the different types of problems they identify. Each of the 12 participating neighborhoods is inspected about once every 18 months, and the data is uploaded to a Web site operated by the Fund for the City of New York, which pioneered ComNET in New York City.

The Worcester Regional Research Bureau uses the data in one of several types of benchmarking reports it issues periodically. The 2004 edition of its report, “Benchmarking Municipal and Neighborhood Services in Worcester,” includes a section called “Physical Conditions of Neighborhoods” that states that close to two-thirds of all problems that volunteers had documented in 2001 had been resolved by 2003.

Worcester officials say the city addresses many of the problems even before the data gathered by volunteers reaches them. But they say that ComNET nonetheless complements their own efforts to improve the quality of public services.

One consequence of the program, says Robert Moylan, the city’s public works director, is that “you bring the community closer to government.” Residents, Moylan says, come to understand that while some problems are resolved immediately, others, such as repaving streets, become part of a capital program that may take months or years to fulfill.

“ComNET is a way to get into the system,” he says, and ensure that the project is added to the department’s list.

Moylan and Dagilis both attended a conference in Worcester last October titled “Sustaining Citizen-Driven Performance Measurement Prospects,” which drew participants from as far away as the West Coast. While many of the other cities using ComNET are large, such as Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, Moylan says the program would be useful in other cities of Worcester’s size and smaller. “Any place where there are neighborhoods,” Moylan says, “it could help.”


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